Joy Buolamwini’s idea seemed simple. For a class project while at graduate school at MIT, she wanted to create a mirror that would inspire her every day by projecting digital images of her heroes onto her face. But when she started using the basic facial recognition software needed to program the mirror, she came across an unexpected issue: it couldn’t detect her face. Unsure of what was wrong, Buolamwini had a few friends and colleagues test the software on themselves, but it recognized each and every one of them without fail.
Suddenly, the problem became clear, as the grad student reached for a white mask and saw that her face was instantly detected: the A.I. facial recognition couldn’t pick up on her dark skin.
