AI Policy Matters – facial recognition, human-centred AI and more

AI Policy Matters is a regular column in the ACM SIGAI AI Matters newsletter featuring summaries and commentary based on postings that appear twice a month in the AI Matters blog. Facial recognition (FR) issues continue to appear in the news, as well as in scholarly journal articles, while FR systems are being banned and some research is shown to be bad science. AI system researchers who try to associate facial technology output with human characteristics are sometimes referred to as machine-assisted phrenologists. Problems with FR research have been demonstrated in machine learning research such as work by Steed and Caliskan in "A set of distinct facial traits learned by machines is not predictive of appearance bias in the wild." Meanwhile many examples of harmful products and misuses have been identified in areas such as criminality, video interviewing, and many others. Some communities have considered bans.