More than a dozen companies offer artificial-intelligence programs that promise to identify a person’s race, but researchers and even some vendors worry it will fuel discrimination
When Revlon Inc. wanted to know what lipstick women of different races and in different countries were wearing, the cosmetics giant didn’t need to send out a survey. It hired Miami-based Kairos Inc., which used a facial-analysis algorithm to scan Instagram photos.
Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. For retailers and other businesses, facial analysis of camera footage promises the ability to learn more about customers in bricks-and-mortar settings, much like they have long used cookies, or small data files that track people’s internet activity, to target online ads. “The physical world is a big vacuum of data because there’s nothing there,” says Ajay Amlani, senior vice president of corporate development at French facial-recognition firm Idemia SAS.
Facial analysis has largely flown under the radar, even as facial recognition has come under fire because poorly trained systems have misidentified people of color. Places such as Boston, San Francisco, Washington state and California have curbed the use of facial recognition in law enforcement. IBM Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have limited their facial-recognition businesses, particularly in selling to police departments.
A person of mixed race might disagree with how an algorithm classifies them, says Carly Kind, director of the Ada Lovelace Institute in London, a research group that focuses on applications of AI. “Technological systems have the power to turn things into data, into facts, and seemingly objective conclusions,” she says.
Mr. Brackeen, who is Black, championed Kairos’s race-recognition system because it could help businesses tailor their marketing to ethnic minorities. Now, Mr. Brackeen believes that race-detection software has the potential to fuel discrimination. Facewatch Ltd., a British facial-recognition firm whose software spots suspected thieves as they enter a store by screening them against a watch list, earlier this year removed an option to track the race, gender or age of shoppers, since “this information is irrelevant,” a spokesman says.
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