Women in AI: LO-11

https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2020/04/10/women-in-media-arts-ai/

I started off this week reading about women in media arts. The first video included on Gender Shades, I did not, sadly, get surprised by the context. What did surprise me however, was how the computer system was so wrong on identifying females of darker color; one as a person at all, and secondly, not even being able to identify their genders correctly. The digital world needs to grow to be neutral and inclusive, and if in testing there is a gap between recognizing people of gender and race, there is a problem. The computation itself is biased, but not by the machine by the programmers. I feel that sometimes testing can be overlooked when it seems to be working fine on individuals, but this is a flaw we see commonly not just in AI but in Women’s healthcare.

For the Women reclaiming AI videos I found the idea of the voice speaking system, that was similar to Alexa to be particularly interesting. I wonder where that could go if those types of questions could be asked by younger girls. Questions about womanhood that could be answered when they need help or clarification, I think, could be pretty revolutionary. I have never tried to ask my Alexa any of those types of questions, but I wonder how current AI on the market would answer. I never really considered how AI might be biased with speaking technology, but I could imagine that if anything, it probably holds the most bias.

 In the European Platform video I also thought it was interesting to consider how AI is imagined with blue, which is a very masculine color and how women can find themselves in that space. Something that I ran across recently when concerning women in coding was hearing about Margaret Hamilton and getting men on the moon. I feel that there is a lot of gender bias in her story and people refused to listen to her and asked her why she was even at NASA, when her programming helped get the astronauts home. She was very overlooked for her astounding work and I don’t think many people ever come across her name.