I suspect you're getting down voted because people see a reason to be outraged at this and you've said you don't understand the outrage.

I'd like to ask someone to articulate the reasons for this outrage. I don't really understand, wasn't this created to show the dangers of facial recognition systems, didn't they have to pick something edgy to get that point across?

Firstly, the researchers seem to have a cracker jack box understanding of the fields they're claiming to upend, what with claiming PHT is widely accepted. Secondly, it's not clear to me that they controlled for enough variables and only doing it on white people is strange. It could really be that gay people use better photos, who knows.

They're claiming to be able to detect gay people but it seems like the system has to be coaxed very carefully into doing that and seems very limited. They built a purposefully inflammatory tech demo that seems to do more to betray their distance from the topic they're studying than it does bolster their reputation. At least from my perspective.

> Secondly, it's not clear to me that they controlled for enough variables and only doing it on white people is strange. It could really be that gay people use better photos, who knows.

Are these two sentences meant to be related to each other, or am I misreading your comment?

No that's a bit confusing. They were meant to be totally unrelated.

So if I understand correctly the problem is not in what they attempted to do, it's that they didn't do it properly. Because they did this incorrectly the results they claim are not conclusive and given the inflammatory nature of the study they should be more careful with their claims?

Basically yes. Also if the point was to show that "AI" or whatever can be used for nefarious ends I think there are better ways of doing it. I have a feeling they were looking for better results than they got.

> ... only doing it on white people is strange.

According to the article, they found few profiles of non-white homosexuals.

I know what they said the reason was, it doesn't make it less strange.

It's not at all strange, for the researchers. If there's too little data, there's nothing to be done. But maybe it's strange that there are so few profiles by non-white homosexuals. It's a cultural thing, I suspect.

Well, if you don't have enough data for the experiment you want to make, then you don't make the experiment.

Not make the experiment and then note that "btw, don't call us out on our poor data, it's not our fault, we tried our best".

Especially so if you're perfectly aware of how controversial your study may be considered.

Racism is an odd choice of words, since ML would probably determine race at a higher level of accuracy than this experiment.

The word "racism" comes directly from the Clare Garvie quote in the article: “At its very worst, this is racism by algorithm.”

She should have used "bigotry" or "discrimination" instead.

Would it? Race is so arbitrary and nonsensical that it’s tough to rationally predict. You could train it to determine things like skin color and other gross morphological features, but only the ones the trainer chooses to represent given races.

I think most posts receive very few votes in any direction. You may be merely looking at a few downvoters, which I feel is a different population than HN at large, since many people can’t even downvote.

I haven't downvoted you, but I'm a bit troubled by your unbridled enthusiasm for how amazing previously futuristic technology is without any consideration of the ways in which it can be abused - as historically such knowledge about others has been abused. I invite you to consider the experience of people whose appearance is distinctive enough that complete strangers feel emboldened to just casually attack them in the street without any prior provocation.

Now imagine the ramifications of having an app that can reliably tag people as gay or suchlike. How do you think that's likely to get used in the real world?