AI melanoma-diagnosis systems perform better on white skin than black skin, largely because their training data contains more examples of white skin.
Notes on verification
Confirmed by multiple independent peer-reviewed and institutional sources (JAAD review, Science Advances/Groh et al., arXiv 2025 study, Melanoma Research Alliance-backed research), all converging on the same finding: AI skin-cancer diagnostic tools underperform on darker skin due to underrepresentation in training datasets like ISIC and HAM10000. [tier=gold indep_score=0.925 clusters=4 claim_tier=notable]
Sources
- These new AI benchmarks could help make models less biased (seed:technology_and_ai)
- https://www.curemelanoma.org/blog/making-ai-work-for-people-of-color-diagnosing-melanoma-and-other-skin-cancers (corroboration)
- https://www.jaad.org/article/S0190-9622(21)02086-7/fulltext (corroboration)
- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq6147 (corroboration)
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14176 (corroboration)