[aab0]

It could also reflect what is most distinguishable. Which is easier for a NN to confidently distinguish: black pubic hair on black skin, or black pubic hair on white skin? Darker nipples on black skin, or darker nipples on white skin? etc You're doing gradient ascent on confidence of classification, not simply trying to find a plausible input, but the maximal input. There's no reason to expect this to be racially unbiased as there are simple objective reasons that higher contrast would be useful. (Similarly, I would not be surprised if a face recognition NN worked better on Europeans rather than Chinese, for the prima facie reason that they have more variable facial features and other aspects like multiple hair colors other than black.)

And since Yahoo needs to detect porn of all races and there's plenty of black porn out there, it would be odd if their porn detector had such a huge gaping hole in it.

[rmc]

> I would not be surprised if a face recognition NN worked better on Europeans rather than Chinese, for the prima facie reason that they have more variable facial features and other aspects like multiple hair colors other than black

To people who are used to them. i.e. to you.

I'm Irish, and can tell many Irish accents apart. But I've had people from England not being able to hear the difference between Irish accents, thinking they all just sounded Irish.

I've literally been in a group of Europeans in Africa, and Africans mixing up several of the women there, because they were all relatively tall, slim build, with longish straight brown hair.

[gotchange]

That's a classical example of «Outgroup Homogeneity» [1] and I'm surprised that some people are still making these arguments to support their claims.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity

[Chris2048]

This only means it's hard to judge manually.

[HSO]

> Similarly, I would not be surprised if a face recognition NN worked better on Europeans rather than Chinese, for the prima facie reason that they have more variable facial features and other aspects like multiple hair colors other than black

Hair color, yes, but facial feature variability? I think your perception of more variability in European faces than Chinese ones says more about where/how you grew up than about the actual variability. To someone who grew up in an Asian monoculture, without exposure to media with European faces, all Europeans would look alike too.

[aangjie]

Err... I'm not so sure about this. I understand that as you grow up in one community, your brain networks/neurons specialize for distinguishing differences in facial features in that community more than in others. While I haven't seen enough chinese to argue, they have lesser facial feature variations, I can imagine how the algorithm defines facial features would be biased more towards the caucasian/European faces. So from the POV of the "facial feature detection" algorithm, European faces will have more variation in facial features than Chinese faces.

Context: I grew up in southern india and spent most of my early years there, but travelled out to the northern India in the mid twenties. I can now say, I can see facial feature variations in the NE India folks(these folks have facial similarity with chinese) I see around now (I currently live in the south)

[randyrand]

I imagine it's both.

[wobbleblob]

> (Similarly, I would not be surprised if a face recognition NN worked better on Europeans rather than Chinese, for the prima facie reason that they have more variable facial features and other aspects like multiple hair colors other than black.)

You might be surprised to learn that to Chinese people, westerners all look more or less the same. To Africans, white people look more or less the same. Our biological hardware is great at distinguishing minute differences in things (especially people) we are very familiar with, while we automatically start generalizing about things we are less familiar with.

For comparison: a metal fan may be able to distinguish a dozen distinctly different styles of Norwegian Black Metal, while to outsiders it's all loud white noise made by people dressed like undead clowns.

[coryfklein]

> You might be surprised to learn that to Chinese people, westerners all look more or less the same.

Yes, I would definitely be surprised if Chinese people thought a pale-skinned Irish woman with shocking red hair looked more or less the same as an olive skinned mediterranean brunette.

The fact of the matter is, the greatly reduced range of hair and skin color in the Chinese is a legitimate reason to think they look more "the same" than a European/Westerner. There is undisputably greater diversity in appearance in Europe than China.

[slackstation]

> it would be odd if their porn detector had such a huge gaping hole in it

phrasing!

I couldn't resist.

[aab0]

That was deliberate. I couldn't resist either.

[FuckOffNeemo]

Have some mindless up votes Sterling.

[Manishearth]

> I would not be surprised if a face recognition NN worked better on Europeans rather than Chinese, for the prima facie reason that they have more variable facial features and other aspects like multiple hair colors other than black

This is false. Each individual has a preferred set of facial features that are used to distinguish faces, and this set is usually dependent on our race and/or where we grow up. People of some races look alike to us because they have lesser variability in this set, but may have more variability in a different set of facial features that our mind is not used to looking for.

A face recognition NN would be biased this way only if the training set was biased, or if it was only taught one set of features.

There's a good explanation of this at http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=3285

[posterboy]

Given a 1 in 10 ratio of blacks in the USA, I expect a similar ratio in porn. It might be different in South America. The algorithmic preference for maximal differences from another comment sounds like a good argument, anyhow.