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AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

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Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#91

Post by jcims »

ceejayoz wrote: post #88
dexen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am dismayed by your example that runs counter to the modern science. While "faster than light neutrino" was highly unexpected and rather suspect from the start, the "bone geometry differs slightly between ethnic groups" is well established among the anthropologists of humans. There are also parallels in wider biology of animals - mentioning that to underscore it's as scientifically expected, and not merely construe…

I agree that an AI model might be able to glean race on a probabilistic basis from x-rays. This specific model's ability to do it from a 64 pixel version of said x-ray makes me skeptical it's doing so successfully.

What if it was an 8x8 grayscale photo of their face? We wouldn't be particularly surprised that it can guess race. The fact that we struggle to detect patterns in the data doesn't mean they don't exist.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#92

Post by andi999 »

AIs do not have magical abilities, I do not trust this result. AI can pick up though easily on technical artifacts. Something like a cofactor: Since they used different databases, maybe one dataset had a high number of people of one self declared race and the other the other self declared race; and each using a different intensity maximum or so.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#93

Post by soundnote »

eptcyka wrote: post #77
throwaway894345 wrote: post #14

Please forgive me for asking a controversial question (particularly so early in the morning), but if there are all of these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that “race is a social construct”? Is the idea that black people have greater bone mineral density (per TFA) due to social or environmental causes (e.g., diet)? For what it’s worth, I’m a staunch egalitarian and I don’t see that changing eithe…

The genetic differences between different people in Africa are far greater than the genetic differences between black and white people in North America. The term "race" as used to describe belonging to a different groups which generally experience their lives vastly differently to other groups is thus inherently social. The hypothesis goes as follows - if black and white people are so similar to each other biological…

Differences between African groups being bigger than between blacks and whites in NA don't make the rough categorization no longer work. For example, there's rather little genetic variety within dogs, or between dogs and wolves, but that doesn't say much about how impactful the variation is: Chihuahuas and Huskies are genetically really similar to each other, but no one in their right minds would disagree that you can comfortably put them in different, very real, very genetics-based buckets.

In general, arguments of variation within a group are not arguments against considering between-group differences, or those between-group differences being real. The variation within a category cannot be dismissed, though, it's hugely important for understanding the world properly and for guiding personal conduct.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#94

Post by ceejayoz »

jcims wrote: post #91
ceejayoz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that an AI model might be able to glean race on a probabilistic basis from x-rays. This specific model's ability to do it from a 64 pixel version of said x-ray makes me skeptical it's doing so successfully.

What if it was an 8x8 grayscale photo of their face? We wouldn't be particularly surprised that it can guess race. The fact that we struggle to detect patterns in the data doesn't mean they don't exist.

> We wouldn't be particularly surprised that it can guess race.

That's actually a great example of this problem, though.

https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-machin...

> It’s a startling image that illustrates the deep-rooted biases of AI research. Input a low-resolution picture of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, into an algorithm designed to generate depixelated faces, and the output is a white man.

> It’s not just Obama, either. Get the same algorithm to generate high-resolution images of actress Lucy Liu or congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from low-resolution inputs, and the resulting faces look distinctly white. As one popular tweet quoting the Obama example put it: “This image speaks volumes about the dangers of bias in AI.”

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#95

Post by hgial »

It might be helpful for folks to look at the blog post written by one of the authors:

https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2021/08/02/ai-has-the...

or the paper itself

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.10356.pdf

I see a lot of "oh it's probably just picking up on x y z" when x, y, and z are things they explicitly checked for:

1) "It's probably just the names or other metadata" – they only gave it pixel data to train on. To control for things like metadata overlaid on the image (e.g., a name written on the image) they divided the images into 3x3 sections and trained classifiers on each section separately.

2) "It's probably some artifact of how the hospital marked up the images" – they used something like 7 different datasets from different hospitals and different modalities (X-Ray and CT).

If it is cheating somehow, it's not doing it in an obvious way that you can think of in a minute or two. Also note that they had more than just medical folks working on the paper; the author list includes plenty of computer scientists. It's unlikely they're making an elementary ML mistake here.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#96

Post by [deleted] »

iSnow wrote: post #52
throwaway894345 wrote: post #14

Please forgive me for asking a controversial question (particularly so early in the morning), but if there are all of these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that “race is a social construct”? Is the idea that black people have greater bone mineral density (per TFA) due to social or environmental causes (e.g., diet)? For what it’s worth, I’m a staunch egalitarian and I don’t see that changing eithe…

Nature does not create "bins" to sort people or things. Some traits are clustered and we latch on the most visible clusters to define "races". In reality, there is broad overlap and if you look up close, the whole concept becomes hairy. Someone with a father of Scandinavian descent and a mother with African lineage, what is that person, black, white, 50/50? It's the same with gender/sex. While the biological substrat…

[deleted]

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#97

Post by phkahler »

sillyquiet wrote: post #28
throwaway894345 wrote: post #14

Please forgive me for asking a controversial question (particularly so early in the morning), but if there are all of these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that “race is a social construct”? Is the idea that black people have greater bone mineral density (per TFA) due to social or environmental causes (e.g., diet)? For what it’s worth, I’m a staunch egalitarian and I don’t see that changing eithe…

IMO it's because it's very dubious the AI is doing what the paper is maintaining it's doing. People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if race is some discrete set of features common to a whole population. Every individual has a set of biological features inherited from their ancestors which, theoretically, could include any or all so-called 'races'. Human beings have a continuum of features that is heavil…

>> People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if race is some discrete set of features common to a whole population.

Clearly people are biologically different based on race and the AI here is picking up on that. My kids orthodontist even told me they align teeth in part based on race. The Asian arch is flatter across the front for example. I asked about this because an engineer I worked with had a father in dentistry and told me my kid had "German teeth in an Irish mouth" which matched her ancestry, which he didn't know - just said that in response to my description of the crowding.

So YES, races have biological differences. If not, we wouldn't be able to tell where people are from. I get that it's not cool to discriminate based on race, but it's not OK or even practical to deny that it exists (see dentistry example above).

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#98

Post by soundnote »

iSnow wrote: post #52
throwaway894345 wrote: post #14

Please forgive me for asking a controversial question (particularly so early in the morning), but if there are all of these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that “race is a social construct”? Is the idea that black people have greater bone mineral density (per TFA) due to social or environmental causes (e.g., diet)? For what it’s worth, I’m a staunch egalitarian and I don’t see that changing eithe…

Nature does not create "bins" to sort people or things. Some traits are clustered and we latch on the most visible clusters to define "races". In reality, there is broad overlap and if you look up close, the whole concept becomes hairy. Someone with a father of Scandinavian descent and a mother with African lineage, what is that person, black, white, 50/50? It's the same with gender/sex. While the biological substrat…

Not quite: Sex is very clearly split into two distinct mechanisms. There's definitely sex-linked distributions of different traits, like male and female typical ranges of height, or agreeable personality, risk-seeking/risk aversion and so on, where both sexes operate the same mechanism.

Races are mostly clusters in variation within one mechanism - eg. skin color is largely a gradient of more or less melanin, and what gets selected for depends on the environment. It's not intrinsically linked to the whole cluster of race-typical traits, those just are in the same genetic bundle that gets inherited from generation to generation, and most of those traits can be mixed.

Sex itself has a sharp divide from the mechanisms themselves being completely different.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#99

Post by mc32 »

Retric wrote: post #63
jollybean wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That race is mostly a social construct, does not abnegate the fact that it can also exist physiologically. 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence. (Edit: when I say 'immediately' I'm indicating this would be an obvious, first order thing to do…

It’s a social construct because the lines aren’t drawn along genetic lines. For example Americans call someone that’s 3/4th white and 1/4th black a black person. Further features that seem very important to us like the shape of our eyes or skin tone may seem irrelevant to a creature which doesn’t have a face and sees the world in a different color spectrum than we do. They might group based on smell or habitat markin…

Part of it is social and part of it is genetic.

From a social PoV, in Cuba, someone as you describe 3/4 one and 1/4 the other would be likely be put in the category of the 3/4. In some places an albino is just someone with different genetic characteristic, in other places they are a creature that brings bad luck and suffer violence.

Dog and cat breeds are distinguished throughout the world. It's genetic and socially constructed as well.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#100

Post by VictorPath »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #14

Please forgive me for asking a controversial question (particularly so early in the morning), but if there are all of these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that “race is a social construct”? Is the idea that black people have greater bone mineral density (per TFA) due to social or environmental causes (e.g., diet)? For what it’s worth, I’m a staunch egalitarian and I don’t see that changing eithe…

> if there are all of these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that “race is a social construct”?

What race is Obama? And how is your answer to that question not a social construct?

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