Google decides to stop training AI on homeless people's faces

Google has announced that it's ending a controversial program that targeted homeless black people and scanned their faces to create AI training data in exchange for measly $5 gift cards. After an internal investigation prompted by news reports about the practice, Google says it's no longer sending third-party contractors out to gather face scans, according to New York Daily News. Instead, it will gather faces exclusively within Google campuses. But, bizarrely, a Google spokesperson is still defending the now-cancelled program. The original goal was to acquire face scans of dark-skinned people so that Google could present its facial recognition algorithms with a more diverse set of training data, a longstanding problem within AI that has led to widespread algorithmic bias against black people and other racial minorities.