The major computer software company Adobe is seeking a patent for an AI image scanner that will enable “diversity auditing.”
The proposed system would automatically audit images’ diversity and issue a scoring. The patent defined “diversity auditing” as a type of data auditing that assesses whether a data set contains certain levels of diversity in race, gender, and age using physical traits referred to as “sensitive attributes.”
“By using machine learning to compute a diversity score based on a distribution of a sensitive attribute (such as race, age, or gender) in a set of images, where the distribution is based on the automatic classification of faces in the images based on the sensitive attribute, at least one embodiment of the present disclosure can automatically audit a set of images for a predetermined level of diversity of the sensitive attribute, thereby allowing a user to avoid manually identifying and tagging information related to the sensitive attribute in each image in the image set, and without requiring manual curation of a control set and labeling the images in the image set for calculating a diversity metric.”