Microsoft has been giving users access to an AI-powered image analysis model that claims it’s able to detect a person’s gender, years after promising to retire the technology.
Microsoft announced it would phase out access to facial analysis tools that claim they can detect a person’s age, emotion, and gender in 2022. This technology, and gender classification tools specifically, have been criticized for often being wrong and particularly harmful for transgender people.
“API access to capabilities that predict sensitive attributes also opens up a wide range of ways they can be misused—including subjecting people to stereotyping, discrimination, or unfair denial of services,” Microsoft said at the time. “To mitigate these risks, we have opted to not support a general-purpose system in the Face API that purports to infer emotional states, gender, age, smile, facial hair, hair, and makeup. Detection of these attributes will no longer be available to new customers beginning June 21, 2022, and existing customers have until June 30, 2023, to discontinue use of these attributes before they are retired.”