[Google] may be able to alleviate the problem by adding more works of art from outside Europe and North America, part of the problem perhaps can’t be fixed, though, in that it was largely wealthy Europeans who commissioned portraits in the centuries prior to our own, and these are the works of art that are popping up in the app for white people who try it.

Nancy Locke

Categorized in : Tech

If a white person gets matched with a 19th-century American portrait of someone who looks fairly similar, but two very different-looking Asian women get matched with the same woodblock print of a figure who looks nothing like them, it’s fair to say that people will see racial bias in the app.