Facial Recognition Is Accurate, if You’re a White Guy Facial recognition technology is improving by leaps and bounds. Some commercial software can now tell the gender of a person in a photograph.
When the person in the photo is a white man, the software is right 99 percent of the time.
But the darker the skin, the more errors arise — up to nearly 35 percent for images of darker skinned women, according to a new study that breaks fresh ground by measuring how the technology works on people of different races and gender.
These disparate results, calculated by Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the M.I.T. Media Lab, show how some of the biases in the real world can seep into artificial intelligence, the computer systems that inform facial recognition.
