[teachingassist]

> why get so moralistic and high-horse about just one?

Not doing so; just observing the facts.

If a proposed 'unsupervised' algorithm of this simplicity highlighted women's faces perfectly, but zoomed in on men's receding hairlines, it wouldn't have made it past the drawing board. Indeed, it's reasonable to believe that nobody would have noticed that it consistently worked for women. We certainly wouldn't know that this algorithm existed or be talking about it here.

We observe a bias in what is considered important to check before shipping.

[refenestrator]

That's an AWFUL lot of assumptions, there. You've constructed an entire complex narrative around something where all we know is that it's very simplistic.

[teachingassist]

I don't think this is a complex narrative. It's the reality of development:

The simplest case is just to pick the most central square, and then you could probably improve that by picking a standard square according the rule of thirds. Those are the naive algorithms - this choice of alternative algorithm is deliberate and isn't as naive or simplistic as you're claiming.

The algorithm is only considered useful because it appears to do better than that, on whatever examples that the developers tried (i.e. there was a business case for using it), and against other possible code.

Including, likely, pictures of their own selves. That's certainly what I would test it on, until it vaguely worked.

What 'awful lot of assumptions' do you think I am making? I don't imagine we are in disagreement about this.