MIT pulls 'racist and misogynistic' dataset offline

MIT has had to take offline a giant dataset that taught AI systems to assign'racist and misogynistic labels' to people in images. The database, known as '80 Million Tiny Images', is a massive collection of photos with descriptive labels, used to teach machine learning models to identify images. But the system, developed at the US university, labelled women as'whores' and'bitches' and used other abhorrent terms against ethnic minorities. It also contained close-up pictures of female genitalia labelled with the C-word and other images with the labels'rape suspect' and'molester'. Images labelled with the slur'whore' ranged from a woman in a bikini to a photo of'a mother holding her baby with Santa', tech website the Register reported.