Artificial Intelligence that Judged a Beauty Contest Was Racist

The Youth Laboratories group that studies ‘deep learning’ with the support of Microsoft held the first beauty contest judged by artificial intelligence in the summer 2016. Among the 44 people whom the AI selected as the most beautiful, there was only one person with dark skin, The Guardian writes.

Anybody could send their photo to Beauty.AI and find out whether they are one of the most beautiful people. There were about 6,000 contest participants from 100 countries all over the world. However, only one of the 44 winners was dark-skinned, and only four were Asian.

Alex Zhavoronkov, Beauty.AI’s chief science officer, said that there are several reasons behind the racial prejudice of artificial intelligence, the main being that there were not enough colored people in the selection of photographs that was used to teach the algorithm to identify beauty. As a result, the robot made a conclusion that fair skin is a sign of attractiveness.