The fact that we have a machine learning algorithm that labels _humans_ as smashers, prostitutes, or convicts is a problem, irrespective of whatever technical justification can be made for it.
It is the technical justification that should be all that matters for a canonical academic dataset. Science does its best to be apolitical, but then politics ("red bull drinking white men train racist and sexist classifiers") is forced upon it, and we can't really have a productive conversation about bias and ethics anymore.
AI needs common sense knowledge of the world to improve. Censorship so science does not offend our sensibilities, would only make it so Google Image Search (a machine learning algorithm) does not return any images of people when you search for "prostitute". Heck, the AI would never learn the difference between a male and a female prostitute. Destruction of accessible knowledge so we (aka: people on Twitter who think AI is the terminator, or the director of the internet) don't get offended by some primitive ML model-as-art-project forced to make errors or awkward classifications. That's a sentence the academic ML community could do entirely without. No benchmarks or duckface selfie would be hurt. No unfortunate third-world souls hired to scan 20 million + internet crawled images for wrongthink, only for the machine to do the unsupervised learning in a hug box, not a black box. Oi mate, you got a loicense fer that label?
Just wait until the activists find out who wrote the first 100 8's added to MNIST. Nobody but MIT would be associated with her, if they found out what she did.