I think it is reasonable for one of the founders and most highly respected members of the field to make confident claims about something that is as open and shut as this. The paper in question was training a network to upres faces. The researchers trained it on a dataset containing primarily White faces and released it on GitHub for reproducibility. Subsequent people used it on Black faces and found it make them white.
This is not surprising. Black faces and White faces are not the same data manifold. This is like training a network to upsample oranges, then running it on an apple and being surprised when the result is an unusual color and texture for an apple.
I’m not sure what else there is possibly wrong here. Is the width of their convolutions racist? Their choice to work on super resolution? The fact that they released their work for reproducibility?
This is not surprising. Black faces and White faces are not the same data manifold. This is like training a network to upsample oranges, then running it on an apple and being surprised when the result is an unusual color and texture for an apple.
I’m not sure what else there is possibly wrong here. Is the width of their convolutions racist? Their choice to work on super resolution? The fact that they released their work for reproducibility?