Extra Credit: Coded Bias Reflection

After watching the documentary, Coded Bias, I have been educated about the problems with artificial intelligence. When Joy Buolamwini made an art project with an algorithm that detected faces, she noticed that her face and other darker-skinned people were not easily detected by the face identification. The programs created by big companies like Amazon and Google have bias by the specific information put into the system. Because the pictures in the data are mostly white males, women and people with different skin tones are not detected and treated the same way. The face identification system used by police also wrongly detects criminals on the streets. The algorithm that companies use is so advanced that even the creators do not fully understand how it works. This has caused problems in hiring and firing workers, miss reading resumes, and giving a disadvantage to women. The computers are learning from the bias in society that even Twitter's experiment with an artificial intelligence named "Tay" began to learn to say racist and sexist comments after reading hurtful tweets in less than 16 hours. Joy created Algorithmic Justice League to help society delete bias against sex, race, and wealth from artificial intelligence. These members are diverse and know how false face recognition can affect their lives. I enjoyed how almost all the interviews in this documentary were from women. It was so refreshing and it shows the representation that is lacking in the algorithm. The fight for these changes to ban bias facial recognition is truly inspiring. We must put some sort of ethics in these mathematical equations.

Citations:

Spotlight - Coded Bias Documentary, www.ajl.org/spotlight-documentary-coded-bias.