[anonporridge]

> Is it 'racism' when facial recognition algorithms perform more poorly on dark skin?

No, because that occurred due to an oversight of not including a representative set of training data. At worst it's implicit racism due to oversight and ignorance.

What Google seemed to do here was more explicit racism, by setting configuration in their system that directly and intentionally discriminates based on race. It's fundamentally worse.

[ForHackernews]

They both seem like goofs to me. I don't see much qualitative distinction. In both cases, engineers have produced racially dubious results by getting sloppy or lazy with their AI models. Personally, I wouldn't call that "racism" but I see how one could make that argument.

[baobabKoodaa]

If you read the OP you will find a link to Google statement where Google officially admits they did this intentionally. They tried to shoot an arrow, and they "missed the mark", oops. They're not sorry for shooting the arrow, they are sorry for missing the mark.

Nobody who worked on facial recognition that failed to recognize black people, nobody in that team was intentionally trying to fail on black people. They didn't try to shoot an arrow, although they accidentally shot one in their own leg.

See how these things are different?

[anonporridge]

Is it not obvious that the distinction is intent to discriminate based on race?

Google, in a self imposed noble desire to rectify poor representation of training data, intentionally injected race discrimination in their system. This intent is what makes it fundamentally worse than unintentionally having non diverse training data.

[adamsb6]

They created a mirror. They didn’t like that the mirror showed reality, so they made it into a one way race-changing funhouse mirror.