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One of the core things I learned studying the ethics and socio-political implications of AI is that everything in the creation of AI or robotics (its conception, programming, training, and implementation) is formed by the biases and intentions of its creators https://twitter.com/VioletRiotGames/status/1344326434236588034
Biases (and systemic power) inform what AI is created and why, as well as who the audience/benefactors are: that is, technology tends to develop to benefit those who are creating it, or at least not to challenge the power they hold
Because it's impossible to use every single piece data to train an AI, creators must decide what data sets are chosen to train the AI, getting human bias involved because those data sets will inevitably skew, especially if its through a single perspective of what is acceptable
And because we have a tendency to view AI as "impartial" or "more objective" than humans, we are less ready to examine how the biases of its creators are presented and then perpetuated through AI, letting them run rampant even as it has the power to harm others
I studied in my fourth year of university how facial emotion recognition software suffered from its biases, particularly how the data sets they were trained on often skewed white, male, and smiling, leaving behind and misreading anyone who didn't fit those categories
And while the initial errors are fairly tame, the fact that facial emotion recognition software could be implemented into apps to see how people respond to information means that the consequences of a software that misreads the majority of the population would be amplified x100
AI is inherently connected with power, but not in the way that people think it is
It's not the robot uprisings of bygone sci-fi we should be concerned and critical about, but how AI plays a part in cycles of systemic power, and its ability to either perpetuate or break it
It's not the robot uprisings of bygone sci-fi we should be concerned and critical about, but how AI plays a part in cycles of systemic power, and its ability to either perpetuate or break it
And we should be concerned about who is at the table to both create and critique AI, which centers around actively including POC, marginalized genders, queer folx, disabled people, and others who are not in places of systemic power in these conversations
