AI-judged beauty contest names 44 winners; nearly all are white, one has dark skin

Beauty.AI promised objective judging: facial symmetry, wrinkles, no human prejudice. Roughly 6,000 people from more than 100 countries submitted photos, including large groups from India and Africa. Of the 44 winners, nearly all were white, a handful were Asian, and one had dark skin.

The contest was built by a deep learning group called Youth Laboratories and supported by Microsoft. Chief science officer Alex Zhavoronkov said the training data did not include enough minorities, so the algorithm concluded on its own that light skin meant beauty. "If you have not that many people of color within the dataset, then you might actually have biased results," he said. Columbia law professor Bernard Harcourt, who studies predictive policing, called the results "the perfect illustration of the problem." Zhavoronkov said the next round, planned for the fall, would include changes designed to weed out discriminatory results.