A Review Of Coded Bias
The film Coded Bias takes an in depth look at the way artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms have been created and programmed with underlying gender and race related biases. The film introduces this issue with the story of a young african american computer science student who tried to create a mirror that can put inspirational faces atop your own to aspire you to be great. Only, when she went to try it out for herself the facial recognition software did not recognize her face as a person unless she put on a white mask. After coming to the realization that the software didn’t recognize her purely because of her race she did some research into the way these programs are set up. After looking into it she found that most of these softwares are programmed to recognize predominantly white males and so african american females are almost foreign to the machine. The documentary then begins to take a deeper dive into different areas of technology across the world using and abusing artificial intelligence and facial recognition software. This includes the United Kingdom police department, Amazon, public schools in Texas, and so much more. All of these places and companies have or are misusing artificial intelligence that is biased either toward one race or one gender. This creates intense discrimination issues because this is supposed to be the future and instead of being equal it is splitting races and genders apart and discriminating like we’ve seen in our nation’s history. The film spends a lot of time explaining the way that China uses facial recognition. In order to use the internet in China, citizens are required to submit their biometric facial information to a database. This allows the Chinese government to track every single person in the country no matter where they are or what they do. They have something called the social credit score. This lets citizens know that the country is constantly tracking them and if anything bad is said about the communist party their social credit score and their friend’s and family’s social credit scores will be affected as well. This gives us an in depth look at the scary possibilities that AI can bring to the entire United States. The racial and gender discrimination of facial recognition and artificial intelligence is shocking. With the power that this technology holds, anything can happen if no change is made so it is intensely important to bring this to the forefront of societal issues.
One thing that I found out that I didn’t know before is that there are artificial intelligence softwares that can sift through different applications for jobs, colleges, etc that are not only used often but are also biased. The documentary gave the example of Amazon using AI technology to sift through possible employee applications. The software is great for productivity and time saving but every single resume chosen was a man. The program was so biased against women that any resume with a female sport, club, or group mentioned on it led the resume to be discarded. As a woman I think it is important to understand that this technology is out there and possible for us to go up against in the future. It is already hard for females to break into big businesses and with technology like this, it’s even harder. The more women that know this technology exists the sooner we can combat the implicit bias of this technology and make the playing field even.
The film mentioned an artificial intelligence “chat bot” called “Tay” created by Microsoft. Within a small 16 HOURS of the program being launched on Twitter it had to be taken down. “Tay” was able to learn, understand, and interact with people on Twitter and was seemingly able to form its own opinions. Within just a few hours “Tay”’ learned how to be racist, misogynistic, and anti-semitist. The chatbot was tweeting out different things that were offensive against seemingly anyone but a white male. The thing that I found most interesting about this was how quickly the computer could learn the way that humans interact and treat each other. Instead of the bot learning to be kind to others,the thing that it picked up most were discriminatory comments made by people on Twitter. I find that to be extremely saddening because this piece of technology was supposedly introduced with no prior opinions, it was fresh like a baby, and within a matter of hours there were enough racist and misogynist remarks for the robot to seemingly learn and think that that’s the way people should talk.
The documentary was extremely influential and informative to me because I learned information that affects me everyday and I had never heard of before. I think the biggest question that I am left with after this is — what biased systems are there in place that we still don’t know about? Are there systems like the Amazon hiring system that are discriminating against different groups of people without anyone knowing? Not only that but after finding these biased technologies how can we fix it and keep it from happening over and over again?
