Incident 454: Emotion Detection Models Showed Disparate Performance along Racial Lines

Description: Emotion detection tools by Face++ and Microsoft's Face API allegedly scored smiling or defaulted ambiguous facial photos for Black faces as negative emotion more often than for white faces.

Tools

New ReportNew ReportNew ResponseNew ResponseDiscoverDiscoverView HistoryView History
Alleged: Megvii and Microsoft developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Black people.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
454
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2018-11-09
Editors
Khoa Lam
Racial Influence on Automated Perceptions of Emotions
papers.ssrn.com · 2018

Abstract

The practical applications of artificial intelligence are expanding into various elements of society, leading to a growing interest in the potential biases of such algorithms. Facial analysis, one application of artificial intellig…

Emotion-reading tech fails the racial bias test
theconversation.com · 2019

Facial recognition technology has progressed to point where it now interprets emotions in facial expressions. This type of analysis is increasingly used in daily life. For example, companies can use facial recognition software to help with …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.