'Rosetta Stone' of AI slammed for 'racist' classification of people's faces

A colossal online image database used as the blueprint for artificial intelligence systems has been labelled "racist" and "cruel" after an online tool revealed strange and disturbing results. ImageNet, a trove of 14 million images hand-labelled by humans as a training guide for AIs, has been credited with kickstarting the modern AI boom and has become a benchmark against which new image recognition systems are measured. This week a public internet tool called ImageNet Roulette, created as part of an art exhibition, went viral on social media as hundreds of people uploaded pictures of their own faces to be classified by an AI. Users were perturbed to find the system tagging their faces with labels...