A super-smart-looking Person of Color™ with the MSNBC Rhodes Scholar-type glasses appeared with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! to complain about — are you sitting down? — White Supremacy™!
As intersectional feminist Anita Sarkeesian has noted, “everything is racist… and you have to point it all out.” So why would AI be any different?
Via Algorithmic Justice League:
In today’s world, AI systems are used to decide who gets hired, the quality of medical treatment we receive, and whether we become a suspect in a police investigation. While these tools show great promise, they can also harm vulnerable and marginalized people, and threaten civil rights. Unchecked, unregulated and, at times, unwanted, AI systems can amplify racism, sexism, ableism, and other forms of discrimination.
The Algorithmic Justice League’s mission is to raise awareness about the impacts of AI, equip advocates with empirical research, build the voice and choice of the most impacted communities, and galvanize researchers, policy makers, and industry practitioners to mitigate AI harms and biases. We’re building a movement to shift the AI ecosystem towards equitable and accountable AI.
This reads much more like a Women’s and Gender Studies dissertation than an informed policy prescription by people who actually understand AI — probably because that’s what it is.
The racialist entrepreneur behind the Algorithmic Justice League, Joy Buolamwini, is very popular in the corporate state media. Here she explains in Time Magazine her “lived experience,” as they say, that spurred her social engineering project (emphasis added):
I experienced [technology-facilitated discrimination] firsthand, when I was a graduate student at MIT in 2015 and discovered that some facial analysis software couldn’t detect my dark-skinned face until I put on a white mask. These systems are often trained on images of predominantly light-skinned men. And so, I decided to share my experience of the coded gaze, the bias in artificial intelligence that can lead to discriminatory or exclusionary practices.
Altering myself to fit the norm—in this case better represented by a white mask than my actual face—led me to realize the impact of the exclusion overhead, a term I coined to describe the cost of systems that don’t take into account the diversity of humanity. How much does a person have to change themselves to function with technological systems that increasingly govern our lives?
We often assume machines are neutral, but they aren’t. My research uncovered large gender and racial bias in AI systems sold by tech giants like IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon. Given the task of guessing the gender of a face, all companies performed substantially better on male faces than female faces. The companies I evaluated had error rates of no more than 1% for lighter-skinned men. For darker-skinned women, the errors soared to 35%. AI systems from leading companies have failed to correctly classify the faces of Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and Serena Williams. When technology denigrates even these iconic women, it is time to re-examine how these systems are built and who they truly serve.”
Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and Serena Williams — the holy trinity of braveness and stunningness.
It’s guaranteed that the DEI industry sees AI as the next golden goose as it becomes more and more pervasive and its disruptive societal impacts — on everyone, not just Persons of Color™ — become more evident.
The obviously partisan Algorithmic Justice League, by the way, is bootstrapped financially by ActBlue Charities, a “nonprofit” described by Influence Watch as “a fundraising platform composed of three separate entities that was created to service left-wing nonprofits and political action committees.”
Related: Springtime for AI
Sometimes I wonder whether the social engineers intentionally boost these people just to muddy the waters and prevent the exact kind of result that this woman ostensibly demands — sane regulatory policy on AI — by turning it into a culture-war hot potato. Conservatives are going to see this nonsense and reflexively associate any calls for AI regulation with woke BS of the sort this individual with the MSNBC glasses is promoting.
