Kashmir Hill for the NYT:
“We’re taking concrete steps to live up to our A.I. principles,” said Ms. Crampton, who has worked as a lawyer at Microsoft for 11 years and joined the ethical A.I. group in 2018. “It’s going to be a huge journey.”
Microsoft Plans to Eliminate Face Analysis Tools in Push for ‘Responsible A.I.’
This coincides with Microsoft’s release of their Microsoft Responsible AI Standard, v2 (see also blog post).
Note, however, that these tools may have been useful for accessibility:
The age and gender analysis tools being eliminated — along with other tools to detect facial attributes such as hair and smile — could be useful to interpret visual images for blind or low-vision people, for example, but the company decided it was problematic to make the profiling tools generally available to the public, Ms. Crampton said.
Trade-offs everywhere.