The Toronto Declaration: Protecting Rights to Non-Discrimination in AI

The other day out of curiosity I was searching for basic words on ImageNet: cat, dog, man, woman.

Here is the page for "woman" http://image-net.org/search?q=woman

I was surprised to notice a couple of things:

- There are categorizations for "mistress", "slut", and "adultress". The closest analogs for "man" appear to be "playboy", "stud", and "pimp". There is also a "foolish woman" and doesn't appear to be an analog for man.

- Look at the pictures for "mistress". Many if not most of them are just women in their bathing suits or doing other normal things, like laying in a bed with a man. The same is true for "slut". Does this mean AIs using ImageNet could look at a woman on a beach and categorize her as a "slut"?

- There is a category for "honest woman", which appears to be three pictures of a woman standing next to a man.

I'm not saying anybody is at fault or that the people who put ImageNet together did this intentionally. After all, it does reflect the (unfortunate) reality of how our society often perceives images of women.

But before I poked through that dataset, it wouldn't have occurred to me how important it is that we focus on equality and non-discrimination when it comes to AI. This declaration seems like an interesting step.