When AI sees a man, it thinks “official.” A woman? “Smile”

Enlarge (credit: Sam Whitney (illustration), Getty Images)

Men often judge women by their appearance. Turns out, computers do too.

When US and European researchers fed pictures of members of Congress to Google’s cloud image recognition service, the service applied three times as many annotations related to physical appearance to photos of women as it did to men. The top labels applied to men were “official” and “businessperson”; for women they were “smile” and “chin.”