tiago_o

It saddens me to see this in Portugal too.

Last week some celebrities and online publications decided to highlight how proud we should be of having a black man with dreadlocks as a TV anchor. No reference or acknowledgement of anything else about him, just "congratulations for being black". At least for a decade race had been as noteworthy as eye color, until now.

Fortunately, a good chunk of the population can still see how backwards it is to reduce an individual to the color of their skin. But I must admit I'm not very hopeful for future generations when I see schools incorporating intersectional activism in their curriculum and people gathering to protest police brutality in what must be one of the most peaceful countries in the world.

It's a sad reality that so many people exist in this Goldilocks zone of damage, where they are in positions of power and influence while being ignorant and lazy enough to parrot American media without context or critical thought.

Maybe training bias. Maybe confirmation bias.

The truth is, we don’t know. A couple of minor changes in the background and you get a counterexample.

Thinking about a traditional face detection method (e.g. Viola-Jones), facial features are isolated based on shape and contrast. I don’t think it’s controversial to say white faces provide better contrast. Maybe a perfectly equitable training set could help, but I doubt it would. Maybe they use a different method altogether.

The traction of the original tweet speaks volumes on how far identity politics has gone in tech and how easily people get swayed into inflammatory generalizations based on superficial, anecdotal and easily-manufactured evidence.