A postdoctoral researcher and teaching assistant at the University of Colorado – Boulder expressed concerns regarding new facial recognition technology being implemented by the Transportation Safety Agency (TSA) in airports throughout the nation.
“The concerns are around areas of bias,” Morgan Klaus Scheuerman said in an interview published this morning by CU’s associate director of strategic relations and communications. “For nonbinary people, the system can’t accurately classify them because all the commercially released systems have historically used a gender binary,” the researcher continued.
Scheuerman, who claims to be “nonbinary,” noted that her 2019 study found that artificial intelligence models had a 0% accuracy rate for identifying “nonbinary” individuals as having no gender.
This is, of course, no surprise. Every single human being is born either male or female – that is a fact of life that cannot be changed.
When asked by the associate director how the “AI genie can be put back in the bottle,” Scheurman suggested that members of the LGBTQ+ community and allies lobby legislators to require bias training for the computer models.
The New Guard sent an inquiry to the CU Boulder media relations office asking why the university allocates funding and resources to such ridiculous research projects. The university did not immediately respond; this article will be updated accordingly.
