Facial recognition software regularly misgenders trans people [shock]

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

They studied 58 separate research papers to see how those researchers handled gender. It wasn’t good. Keyes found that researchers followed a binary model of gender more than 90 percent of the time, viewed gender as immutable more than 70 percent of the time, and—in research focused specifically on gender—viewed it as a purely physiological construct more than 80 percent of the time.

“Such a model fundamentally erases transgender people, excluding their concerns, needs and existences from both design and research,” Keyes wrote in The Misgendering Machines, a research paper they published in November.

Machines aren’t value neutral, they act as they’re programmed. “We’re talking about the extension of trans erasure,” Keyes said. “That has immediate consequences

motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/7xnwed/facial-recognition-software-regularly-misgenders-trans-people

Computer says no.

If only more women were more gender confirmstive. You could program them to detect gender using fake eyelashes and lipstick.

The point with AIs is that you don't deliberately program to detect makeup as a proxy for gender - but if the photos are tagged with 'gender' eg masculine, feminine or neither, then there's a good chance that fairly accurate assignments could be made which would actually be relying on such gender stereotypical cues.

And we have just solved the conundrum of why Cyberdyne Systems [TM], on reaching sentience, decided to kill all the humans.

Errol you really piqued my interest. On training AI to recognise tanks:

In the early days of the perceptron the army decided to train an artificial neural network to recognize tanks partly hidden behind trees in the woods. They took a number of pictures of a woods without tanks, and then pictures of the same woods with tanks clearly sticking out from behind trees. They then trained a net to discriminate the two classes of pictures. The results were impressive, and the army was even more impressed when it turned out that the net could generalize its knowledge to pictures from each set that had not been used in training the net. Just to make sure that the net had indeed learned to recognize partially hidden tanks, however, the researchers took some more pictures in the same woods and showed them to the trained net. They were shocked and depressed to find that with the new pictures the net totally failed to discriminate between pictures of trees with partially concealed tanks behind them and just plain trees. The mystery was finally solved when someone noticed that the training pictures of the woods without tanks were taken on a cloudy day, whereas those with tanks were taken on a sunny day. The net had learned to recognize and generalize the difference between a woods with and without shadows!

www.jefftk.com/p/detecting-tanks
It looks like it might be true, but v old (60s)

I think it may be an urban myth, but it demonstrates a truth about AI systems.

Bollocks article. Once upon a time, I worked in a woo woo job and was trained in facial recognition and used FR software daily.

FRS is designed to be ‘gender’ blind. It’s purpose is to identify an individual, not be obfuscated by things like makeup, hairstyles etc. Even changes from HRT and minor facial surgery barely make a difference.

I saw many examples, both in training and irl, where it successfully identified an individual who’d changed ‘gender’. Also examples where it got it wrong because it matched a natal female and a natal male who were definitely not the same individual but had very, very similar facial characteristics.

Fun fact for any tin-foil-hatters: your ears are actually more important in this type of process than the ‘gender’ written on your documents.

OMG. Someone call a waaahmbulance.

What about people like Pips Bunce and the police officer who has warrants under the names of Abi and Colin on different days? How is the machine supposed to differentiate between their alter egos?

We are all human facial recognition computers, and we know a man when we see one.

Ok Pollydron, now you’re going to have to tell us more about your job because that sounds fascinating!!