Beauty.AI was used in the first ever international beauty contest being judged by an AI.
Machines are objective, they have no bias, and they don’t make human errors. That’s the rationale behind all the AI research that is going on in the tech industry today. However, an AI is only as good as its creator. It does what it’s been taught. So, the first International beauty contest ever to be judged by machines, was expected to be unbiased. The AI was supposed to judge contestants on things like wrinkles, facial symmetry and so on. Turns out, the AI was biased against the dark skinned.
According to reports, the AI judged about 6000 contestants, from over 100 countries, and the results showed the discrepancy. 44 winners were chosen by the machine, out of which almost all were white, while some were Asian, and only one dark skinned contestant was chosen. Reports say that a lot of contestants from India and Africa had entered the beauty contest, which was judged by Beauty.AI, a complex algorithm that determines what true beauty is.
Beauty.AI has been developed by a company called Youth Laboratories, which has Microsoft and Nvidia amongst its partners. The company also has an app called Rynkl, which helps users track wrinkles on their faces.
This isn’t the first instance of an AI making racist decisions either. Microsoft’s chatbot, Tay, which was put on Twitter as a test, turned racist in a matter of hours, prompting the company to take it down and apologise.
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