[marmshallow]

What’s this about soap dispensers?

[croes]

FB had a soap dispenser that didn't recognize black people.

https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da...

[nullc]

When the video comes up, facebook displays a message that says it is "false information".

(And when you click "why" you get a picture of Arabic text, which can't be copy/pasted into translation software)

Shame on you for distributing false information, it's a good thing we have facebook protecting The Truth. /s

[mardifoufs]

The link says that it's partly false because it's an infrared sensor, that doesn't detect any skin color and isn't biased by virtue of not really making any decision. It just dispenses soap when the infrared sensor gets triggered. The problem is that according to the article black skin does not reflect infrared radiation very well (no idea if that's true, but that's the claim here) meaning it's more of a physical limitation than a "defect" as can be argued in the case of AI models.

But the article also says that a counterargument could be that the existence of machines that aren't very suited to a big part of the population can be seen as proof of some latent Racism (to be more accurate, discrimination is closer to what's used in the article) whether intentional or not.