Beauty.AI held the first international beauty contest judged by robots.
The first international beauty contest judged by robots has raised some serious concerns about the biased results produced by artificial intelligence.
There was hardly any person with black skin color among the contestants selected by the machines as winners when Beauty.AI held the first international beauty contest judged by robots, reported The Guardian.
About 6000 people from more than 100 countries had sent their photos to participate in the contest. The selection was done by a panel of five robots that used artificial intelligence to analyze specific traits.
Complex algorithms were developed to find out the most closely resembled human beauty.
But, out of the 44 winners, almost everyone was whites. Some of them were Asians and the rest of the winners were whites. Only one person with a black skin was there in the group.
Beauty.AI – which was created by a “deep learning” group called Youth Laboratories used a huge number of photos of people to build an algorithm to assess human beauty. But, the result shows that the algorithm created by the group was a biased one towards the white people.
According to Alex Zhavoronkov, Beauty.AI’s chief science officer, the dataset used to build the algorithm didn’t have enough minorities. Apart from this, the group failed to build the algorithm in a way it treats black skin as a sign of beauty.
“If you have not that many people of color within the dataset, then you might actually have biased results,” Zhavoronkov told The Guardian.
“When you’re training an algorithm to recognize certain patterns … you might not have enough data, or the data might be biased,” he added.
Experts are of the opinion that the prejudice within the human mind is being transformed into the machine in the form of an algorithm.
The minority groups in a society are not well represented in datasets leading to faulty algorithms and inaccurate conclusions based on the same.
However, Youth Laboratories, which is being supported by Microsoft, is trying to correct the mistakes and come out with an accurate system to judge external beauty.