In every reported mistaken arrest using facial recognition, person was Black

There are:

1) technical limitations - even high end color printers today, have problems with reproducing various shades of brown, which is what almost all Black people in the USA at least, are (there are a few people with very dark skin which is more truly black).

If you want a torture test for a color printer, take a photo of a brown/beige wall with a medium brown sofa in front of it, lit by a single light source from one side. The range of brown colors will be very tough to produce properly.

2) tuning limitations, often of the photographer - you can look at black and white photos from even the 1940s for instance of musicians and the black musicians are exposed and developed properly. See for instance the first photo here: https://unblinkingeye.com/Articles/Harvey/harvey.html or an image search for "1940s jazz musicians"

The school photographer that the person mentioned in the article just didn't know how to adjust the exposure properly; they likely set up a distance from the camera, with a set amount of flash, set the same exposure for that school like they did for the 20 others they were going to, and popped off all the photos at the exact same settings.

Whenever you see an article about someone complaining about "privileged photographic chemical processes" -- check to see if the author of the article ever talked to an actual color scientist.

Note: there are some changes in the chemistry to allow for tinting - but that is a bias that can be overcome quite easily if photographing people who are of a different ethnicity.

Btw this is exactly the same reason why camera lenses are black on the inside.

They were using film “a long time ago”. Wedding photographers have only been shooting digital for 20 years or so.

Early digital had a somewhat poor dynamic range. It’s gotten better, but it was really rough in the early days.

> If you know how to use your equipment you shouldn't have any problem taking photos of people of any skin color, not even the lightest person next to the darkest.

This statement seems so obviously and fundamentally wrong that I must be missing something. I meet enough photographers that know how to use their equipment, but have never taken a decent photograph in their life, except one or two exceptions which appear to be accidents. This seems like a very natural and understandable thing to me—there’s a lot to painting besides understanding how to use brushes and paint, and there’s a lot to building a house besides knowing how to use a nailgun and circular saw. There’s a lot more to programming than knowing how to use your compiler.

Maybe I’m missing the meaning here, because it doesn’t make any sense to me.

> These days you shoot in raw with a digital camera, vary the exposure if needed, and set the white balance as needed when editing.

That’s the first week of photography 101. Have you taken more advanced photography courses? Have you ever taken a photograph of a dark-skinned subject, wearing a pure white dress, and then printed it out? My personal experience is, that once you print your photos out (which is normal for wedding photos), and get some people with an experienced eye to look at them and give them a critique, you start to develop an appreciation for how understanding your equipment & process is just the barrier for entry to the field, and it makes you a novice.

Let me tell you—it is not trivial to make the picture show a flattering image of both the dark skin, and the white dress, with the delicate details in both. You need to know a lot more than just how to use your equipment. It is especially difficult if you are not in control of the lighting.

The raw workflow is nice, but your raw file goes through a lot of processing to turn into a viewable image, and many of the stock presets are modeled after the way film does it. You’re not really escaping the problem, in any sense, by using raw.

Once you dive into the sensitometry of how color films work, it becomes apparent that everything is a tradeoff. You have three light-sensitive layers, and you get to control their contrast curves, and you control their spectral response with sensitizing dyes. The physics and chemistry of light-sensitive materials imposes some constraints on the spectral responses of the different layers (which, if you think about it, explains why the different layers are always stacked in the same order, across different types of film).

Some films are advertised as “natural colors”, like Kodak 160NC, but if you dive into it, you realize that there is no such thing as “natural colors”, there is just a certain look you get with a certain film in certain conditions.

It’s not like it’s impossible for wedding photographers to shoot dark-skinned subjects at a wedding, the point is:

1. There are some difficulties inherent to the problem,

2. Your equipment (film or digital) is not configured out of the box to take good pictures of dark-skinned people.

A lot of work was put into films and digital cameras to make light-skinned people look good. It’s something people care about, and various companies invested money and made it happen. It will also take work to make pictures of dark-skinned people as easy, and there are still a lot of equipment and photographers out there who are bad at it.

That is, I'm mostly inclined to agree with you. But I also trusted a ton of the other discussion I've seen on this. Which seems to be largely in agreement that film itself had to change to get good pictures of darker skinned people.

I got the impression that if you go with black and white, you dodge many of these problems, amusingly. But adding color to the mix makes things very difficult.

But, by the time we got to Google and Apple? The problems with photographing dark subjects would have been well understood. It's sad that it took being "outed" in the media for those companies to actively address the issue.

What I don't know is how much of the issue was "new" (re-introduced by the software behind the phone camera magic) or "existing" (the same problem with color/white balance that has existed since the dawn of photography). If it was "new", that's rather damning, IMO, since the problem space was known, and the product people chose to ignore it. Put another way - some of this is just physics, but how much was physics and how much was software ignoring one set of subjects in an effort to improve outcomes for another?

But, no, probably not intentionally spiteful. Just some combination of lazy, greedy, and ignorant.

And further to your point, if a DA's office keeps arresting people incorrectly, they won't keep that job.

The fact that we as a society are not okay with just arresting the wrong person is how we started talking about 'stop & frisk' and its shortcomings in the public domain. It's how we had BLM summer and many other protests after the killing/arrest/etc. of innocent people.

and that's how we should respond when the wrong person is arrested

who can I call when "the AI got it wrong"? It's worse than google customer service.

If either of those scenarios came to pass the police unions stand ready to defend them. At most the cop will get some paid leave and a settlement payout (as well as the victim at great expense to the town/city) and maybe cop will be transferred to a new department while the whole complaint is put under a NDA.

You've got it exactly.

The problem is modern AI systems cannot be vetted because neither their creators nor their users actually understand how they work (yes, the mechanics are understood, but the emergent properties are not).

I believe we need regulations that prevent the use of unauditable technologies in a bunch of key industries, including banking, law enforcement, healthcare, etc. Basically anywhere where a person's rights may be violated by these systems.

We actually fought this same battle not too long ago with photo radar systems due to issues with their accuracy, and the result was mandated transparency (at least in some jurisdictions). These new technologies just supercharge the problem.

Right, I understand that in the context of this specific quote, but the article implies that claim.

> Give it a photo of a black person to search on and you're probably getting a black person as a match, but the likelihood that it's actually the same person is lower than it would be if you were searching for a white person.

Lower, but by how much? The number given here is six in all. It feels very premature to use probably in that sentence. (Edit: misread that as you’re probably going to get a match)

> The quote doesn't say it's increasing arrest rates for black people, but arrest rates for innocent black people.

I meant this quote from the article: “facial recognition leads police departments to arrest Black people at disproportionately high rates.”

But I agree. It seems that there is a disparity in accuracy, it’s very unclear on how much of one but so far it appears that we’re talking about a fraction of a percent. We only have a sample size of six to draw on. We don’t know the demographics of the districts this has been employed in, and it seems strange to assume that they’re the same as the American population at large. I mean the first example is from Detroit.