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

by Joy Buolamwini

Some companies and researchers go as far as claiming that their systems can predict someone’s sexual orientation, political affiliation, intelligence, or likelihood of committing a crime based solely on their facial features.[8] I still remember my disbelief when I came across a 2017 study where the authors used images of more than eighteen hundred people to create a classifier to predict criminality based on a face image.[9] I was also alarmed when I read a September 2017 article in The Economist about Stanford researchers who made classifiers to categorize someone’s sexual orientation based solely on an image of their face. In the article, one of the researchers suggested that with the right dataset they could “spot other intimate traits, such as IQ or political views.”[10] Predicting someone’s internal state, identity, or future behavior based on facial features alone is unreliable, but the impact can still be consequential. Being labeled criminal or homosexual can lead to harmful discrimination and even death.