600,000 Images Removed from AI Database After Art Project Exposes Racist Bias

ImageNet will remove 600,000 images of people stored on its database after an art project exposed racial bias in the program's artificial intelligence system. Created in 2009 by researchers at Princeton and Stanford, the online image database has been widely used by machine learning projects. The program has pulled more than 14 million images from across the web, which have been categorized by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers -- a crowdsourcing platform through which people can earn money performing small tasks for third parties. According to the results of an online project by AI researcher Kate Crawford and artist Trevor Paglen, prejudices in that labor pool appear to have biased the machine learning data. Training Humans -- an exhibition that opened last week at the Prada Foundation in Milan -- unveiled the duo's findings to the public, but part of their experiment also lives online at ImageNet Roulette, a website where users can upload their own photographs to see how the database might categorize them.