Overview
- FHIBE contains 10,318 images from 1,981 paid participants across 81 countries, with informed consent and the ability for contributors to remove their images.
- Each photo includes self-reported attributes such as age, pronouns, and ancestry plus detailed environment and camera metadata to support fine-grained fairness evaluations.
- Early evaluations using FHIBE confirmed known biases and revealed failures, including lower accuracy for people using she/her pronouns, stereotype-reinforcing occupation outputs, and higher toxic responses for some ancestry and skin-tone groups.
- Terms of use prohibit applications tied to law enforcement, the military, arms, or surveillance, setting explicit limits on how the dataset can be deployed.
- Sony positions FHIBE as a public evaluation benchmark rather than a training corpus, noting sub‑$1M collection costs and contrasting its approach with many scraped datasets, several of which have been revoked.