FR technology has become the centre-stage of a wide range of racial, ethnic, and gender biases and raised racial controversy
Finally, Microsoft has joined Facebook and announced to retire its AI-powered facial analysis tools, including those to infer emotional state and identity gender, age, smile, facial hair, hair and makeup.
So far, Microsoft had allowed access to its open-ended API technology that can scan peoplesfaces and help infer their emotional state based on their facial expressions or movements.
The tech giant said it will stop offering these features to new customers from June 21, while existing customers will have their access revoked on June 30, 2023.
Read: Biometric facial comparison technology introduced at all US airports (June 7, 2022)
It further added that thedecision has been taken as part of Microsofts Responsible AI Standard, a framework to guide how it builds AI systems.
AI is becoming more and more a part of our lives, and yet, our laws are lagging behind. Theyhave not caught up with AIs unique risks or societys needs, said Natasha Crampton, chief responsible AI officer at Microsoft.
While we see signs that government action on AI is expanding, we also recognize ourresponsibility to act. We believe that we need to work towards ensuring AI systems are responsible by design, she said in a statement.
Row over facial recognition technology
In fact, Microsoft is not the first to discard this system as Meta had already announced that itwould shut down Facebook facial recognition system, deleting the face scan data of more than one million users.
Unlike Face Detection, which helps in matching a detected face against a database of faces,Facial Recognition goes beyond to add value to surroundings and bringing up more details aboutthe person and his location based on images and videos.
Although the accuracy of facial recognition as a biometric tool is lower than iris recognition and fingerprint recognition, it was widely deployed by several governments and private companies in advanced humancomputer interaction, video surveillance and automatic indexing of images due to its advantages of contactless feature, especially during the pandemic.
However, facial recognition (FR) technology has become the centre-stage of a wide range of racial, ethnic, and gender biases. It has raised racial controversy with concerns such asviolating citizens privacy, making incorrect identifications, encouraging gender norms andbeing used in racial profiling.
Read: Black or White? Bias persists in machine learning models too (June 2, 2022)
Here are some bizarre findings on FR:
We found that older individuals, masculine presenting individuals, those with darker skintypes, or in photos with dim ambient light all have higher errors ranging from 20-60% Genderestimation is more than twice as bad on corrupted images as it is on clean images; ageestimation is 40% worse on corrupted images, coauthors of the Maryland study wrote.
A study conducted by researchers at the University of Virginia found that two prominent research-image collections displayed gender bias.
Another collection of 80 million tiny Images, was found to have a range of racist, sexist, and otherwise offensive annotations. Nearly 2,000 images were labeled with the N-word, and labels like rape suspect and child molester.
In a bizarre complaint in 2015, a software engineer pointed out that the image recognitionalgorithms in Google Photos were labeling his Black friends as gorillas.
Same algorithm hasshown that Googles Cloud Vision API had labeled thermometers held by a Black person as gunswhile thermometers held by a light-skinned person as electronic devices.
Read: Facebook to shut down facial recognition system (October 3, 2021)
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in 2019 had largely discontinued the sale of facial recognitionservices but have so far declined to impose a moratorium on their data or products.
Tracy Pizzo Frey, managing director of responsible AI at Google Cloud, says the FR system has its limitations but the bias detection remains a very active area of research at Google as these help us improve our API.
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Why are tech giants shutting facial recognition... - The American Bazaar
