Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines

by Joy Buolamwini

I experimented with having workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk (a platform that allowed researchers to put out low-priced micro tasks for crowdsource workers to complete) assign age, gender, and race labels to images from an existing face dataset. The same faces would be shown to multiple workers known as turkers, and I would examine the labels. When it came to age, having turkers guess a defined range instead of a specific age produced more consistent results. When it came to guessing race, I first used categories from the U.S. Census and left open an “other” category. The results of that category provided the most insights. It became clear that the Census categories were ill-equipped to deal with people the turkers perceived as South Asian, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, or of mixed race.