QOVES AI beauty assessment tool raises bias concerns

An Australian company developed an AI-powered beauty assessment tool that tells people how attractive they are and what they can do to improve it, raising concerns about bias and transparency.

Technology Review notes that Sydney-based startup QOVES is one of many companies offering facial analysis services, though few of them are keen to describe or talk about how their algorithms work in meaningful detail. 

Commentators reckon this reluctance stems from the desire to protect commercial IP on the one hand; on the other it provides a convenient fig leaf for a science that is highly subjective and, given this subjectivity, highly biased. 

QOVES describes itself on its website as a 'facial aesthetics consultancy dedicated to answering the age-old question of what makes a face attractive through modern science, telehealth and machine learning.'