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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Never mind the images; who was deciding what 'race' the training data matched against? In this modern age of globalism, they must have searched hard to find anyone with any kind of historically-categorized dna.

I'm guessing, they just used folks' self-identification for race on some form. Which is largely a social construct.

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From the preprint ( https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2107/2107.10356.pdf ) : " In this work, we define racial identity as a social, political, and legal construct that relates to the interaction between external perceptions (i.e. “how do others see me?”) and self-identification, and specifically make use of the self-reported race of patients in all of our experiments. "

Thank you. Exactly as I feared. Its a social definition, and makes it even more weird that an AI could predict from physical attributes i.e. an x-ray.

What percentage of dark skinned people of African descent do you think wouldn't self-identity as black? Same for percentage of light skinned European descent, Asian descent, Central/South American descent, etc.? I'm sure there are some out there who would identify as a different race, and there are people of mixed heritage that throw a wrench in the works too, but the vast majority of humans will self-identity as a race that matches with their skin color and heritage.

And there lies the fundamental socially-embedded racism inherent in the idea of 'black'. That somehow, having even a fraction of an ancestral African lineage makes a person 'black' - it taints them, stains them and they are automatically labelled as that part, even though they may be 95% other lineages.

For clarity: Why isn't a person who has even 1/64th of a 'white' heritage automatically termed 'white'? It makes exactly as much sense that way. Yet we choose the other.

It's clear that an AI cannot know about this cultural bias. So how on earth can it map an x-ray to the imaginary idea of 'black'?

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