The Basque Country is implementing Quantus Skin in its health clinics after an investment of 1.6 million euros. Specialists criticise the artificial intelligence developed by the Asisa subsidiary due to its “poor” and “dangerous” results. The algorithm has been trained only with data from white patients.
A lot of AI research in general was first done by largely Caucasian students, so the datasets they used skewed that way, and other projects very often started from those initial datasets. The historical reason there are more students of that skin tone is because they have in general the most money to finance the schooling, and that’s because past racism held African-American families back from accumulating wealth and accessing education, and that still affects their finances and chances today, assuming there is no racism still going on in scholarships and accepting students these days.
Not saying this is specifically happening for this project, just a lot of AI projects in general. It causes issues with facial recognition in lots of apps for example.
They did touch on the facial recognition aspect as well. My main thing is, does that make the model racist if the source data is diverse? I’d argue that it’s not, although racist decisions may have lead to a poor dataset.