>This is plain physics, no? Things are darker or lighter depending on the amount of light they reflect.
Not quite. I don't know all the technical terms, but apparently, photograph technology early on settled on some standards and made some design choices that made it easier to photograph white than black people. That set a long-term precedent and standard for how film should work that persisted for a while and even to the present.
>>>Until recently, due to a light-skin bias embedded in colour film stock emulsions and digital camera design, the rendering of non-Caucasian skin tones was highly deficient and required the development of compensatory practices and technology improvements to redress its shortcomings. Using the emblematic “Shirley” norm reference card as a central metaphor reflecting the changing state of race relations/aesthetics, this essay analytically traces the colour adjustment processes in the industries of visual representation and identifies some prototypical changes in the field...
https://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/219...
Lay article on the topic:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/syreetamcfadden/teachin...
This is plain physics, no? Things are darker or lighter depending on the amount of light they reflect.
> I know that people are quick to jump to condemn something as racist but sometimes there really are just honest mistakes.
There are far too many things at play here. In a fair and just society, this kind of issue (like the XBOX Kinetic issue) would be met with a "oops, forgot to account for individual light absorption variance". A fix would have been issue and that's that.
Now, the problem starts when you begin digging. Why was this problem not caught? Because QA teams didn't catch it. Why didn't they catch it? Because the team wasn't very diverse, so testing failed to catch the problem? Why wasn't the team diverse enough? ... and now I've entered a societal rabbit hole that's far too complex for this post.
> I have a hard time believing that anyone at any level of the AWS structure set out to produce a racist facial recognition
Yes, highly doubtful. No benefit, and major issues if caught. It is far more likely that the dataset itself was biased. Why was it biased? ... and there we go again.
> we should sometimes temper the often strong reaction produced when labeling something racist, and focus our efforts on identifying and solving the issue rather than trying to act punitive.
Agreed, in principle. In practice, this produces no results in a mostly racist society. Companies (and politicians) will listen to outrage, they won't listen to well articulated and well-reasoned comments.