this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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It's still not racism. The article itself says there is a lack of diversity in the training data. Training data will consist of 100% "obvious" pictures of skin cancers which is most books and online images I've looked into seems to be majority fair skinned individuals.
"...such algorithms perform worse on black people, which is not due to technical problems, but to a lack of diversity in the training data..."
Calling out things as racist really works to mask what a useful tool this could be to help screen for skin cancers.
Why is there a lack of robust training data across skin colors? Could it be that people with darker skin colors have less access to cutting edge medical care and research studies? Would be pretty racist.
There is a similar bias in medical literature for genders. Many studies only consider males. That is sexist.
My only real counter to this is who created the dataset and did the people that were creating the app have any power to affect that? To me, to say something is racist implies intent, where this situation could be that, but it could also be a case where it's just not racially diverse, which doesn't necessarily imply racism.
There's a plethora of reasons that the dataset may be mostly fair skinned. To prattle off a couple that come to mind (all of this may be known, idk, these are ignorant possibilities on my side) perhaps more fair skinned people are susceptible so there's more data, like you mentioned that dark skinned individuals may have less options to get medical help, or maybe the dataset came from a region with not many dark skinned patients. Again, all ignorant speculation on my part, but I would say that none of those options inherently make the model racist, just not a good model. Maybe racist actions led to a bad dataset, but if that's out of the devs control, then I wouldn't personally put that negative on the model.
Also, my interpretation of what racist means may differ, so there's that too. Or it could have all been done intentionally in which case, yea racist 100%
Edit: I actually read the article. It sounds like they used public datasets that did have mostly Caucasian people. They also acknowledged that fair skinned people are significantly more likely to get melanoma, which does give some credence to the unbalanced dataset. It's still not ideal, but I would also say that maybe nobody should put all of their eggs in an AI screening tool, especially for something like cancer.
There is a more specific word for it: Institutional racism.