gender, race, and power in AI
Nothing compares to having a place at the table, influencing changes that will shape the future.
Diversity is one of the fundamental properties for survival of species, populations and organizations. Diversity affects what products get built, who they are designed to serve, and who benefits from their development.
Contributions from creative men and women of all backgrounds are crucial to realise our goals and encourage a more diverse future. Discriminating by race and gender to limit access to employment and education is suboptimal for a society that wants to achieve greatness.
Reducing discrimination in AI with new methodology
AI algorithms recapitulate biases contained in the data on which they are trained.
Training datasets may contain historical traces of intentional systemic discrimination, biased decisions due to unjust differences in human capital among groups and unintentional discrimination, or they may be sampled from populations that do not represent everyone.
Systems that use physical appearance as a proxy for character or interior states are deeply suspect, including AI tools that claim to detect sexuality from headshots, predict ‘criminality’ based on facial features, or assess worker competence via ‘micro-expressions.’ Such systems are replicating patterns of racial and gender bias in ways that can deepen and justify historical inequality.
The commercial deployment of these tools is cause for deep concern.
DISCRIMINATING SYSTEMS Gender, Race, and Power in Al.
This report is the culmination of a year long pilot study examining the scale of AI’s current diversity crisis and possible paths forward. This report draws on a thorough review of existing literature and current research working on issues of gender, race, class, and artificial intelligence.
The review was purposefully scoped to encompass a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, incorporating literature from computer science, the social sciences, and humanities.
It represents the first stage of a multi-year project examining the intersection of gender, race, and power in AI, and will be followed by further studies and research articles on related issues.