Looking Outward 11

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

I look into the article “Women in Media Arts: Does AI think like a (white) man?”, where the author discusses the inherent discrimination in artificial intelligence due to the predominantly white male society. This is due to the fact that “the AI is only as good …  as the data it feeds.” Thus if the internet is still populated by artwork from white males or drawn from a white male perspective, this inherent bias will forever exist in the AI’s algorithm.

This statement has been exemplified by an AI face recognition software, where the error rate is significantly high among women of color, displaying this inherent prejudice in the AI’s database. AI teams that lack diversity in gender and race would most definitely produce software that lacks a bigger perspective, and thus bares bias that favors white males.

The article has given examples of efforts to counteract this bias, such as the feminist data set, an ongoing multi-year project that collects feminist data such as artworks, essays, interviews, and books on feminism or from that a feminist’s perspective. This data set would help push diversity in the AI algorithm and broadens the perspective of the AI’s database.