When AI Sees a Man, It Thinks 'Official.' A Woman? 'Smile'

Turns out, computers do too. When US and European researchers fed pictures of congressmembers to Google's cloud image recognition service, the service applied three times as many annotations related to physical appearance to photos of women as it did to men. The top labels applied to men were "official" and "businessperson;" for women they were "smile" and "chin." "It results in women receiving a lower status stereotype: That women are there to look pretty and men are business leaders," says Carsten Schwemmer, a postdoctoral researcher at GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Köln, Germany. He worked on the study, published last week, with researchers from New York University, American University, University College Dublin, University of Michigan, and nonprofit California YIMBY.