De Balie organised an evening with Madhumita Murgia about her recent book Code-Dependent. Our own Naomi Appelman was asked to reflect on the book.
Continue reading “The entanglement of the (Dutch) government and Big Tech when it comes to AI”
The Dutch tax office is plagued by one problem after another. The Child Benefits Scandal was supposed to be a wake-up call, but apparently, their system use is so atrophied that they can’t seem to do what is needed. Follow the Money reports on a letter from the Dutch data protection authority to the Minister of Finance, which argues that the tax office uses 50 algorithms that use discriminatory profiling and are therefore potentially unlawful.
Continue reading “50% of the profiling algorithms used by the Dutch tax office are discriminatory and therefore unlawful according to the Data Protection Authority”
Starting October 21th, 2025.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
Starting September 24th, 2025.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
Do you remember when our Robin Pocornie filed a complaint with the Dutch Human Rights Institute because Proctorio, the spyware that she was forced to use as a proctor for doing her exams from home, couldn’t find her face as it was “too dark”? (If not, read the dossier of her case.)
Continue reading “Setting the record straight: Scientists show that the algorithm that Proctorio used is incredibly biased towards people with a darker skin colour”
Starting July 29th, 2025.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
Starting July 3rd, 2025.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
To successfully govern our information society in the years to come, a solid understanding of technological developments is crucial. The Masterclass Net Politics is a series of meetings with speakers from Amnesty International, Bits of Freedom, Internet Society Netherlands, Open State Foundation, PublicSpaces, SetUp, Waag Futurelab, and yours truly: The Racism and Technology Center.
Continue reading “Join the (Dutch) Masterclass Net Politics!”
For a day or so, Musk’s Grok AI chatbot would add its belief in a “white genocide” in South Africa, by now a classic white supremacist fabrication, to nearly every answer it would give regardless of the question asked.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Grok AI is obsessively focused on the extreme right trope of “white genocide” in South Africa”
Starting June 3rd, 2025.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
The Dutch Institute for Human Rights has published an evaluation framework for risk profiling intending to prevent discrimination based on race or nationality.
Continue reading “Dutch Institute for Human Rights creates an evaluation framework for risk profiling and urges organisations to do more to prevent discrimination based on race and nationality”
Whistleblowers at Meta have shown how the Israeli government is requesting pro-Palestine posts to be censored, with Meta complying in most cases.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Mass Israeli censorship of pro-Palestine posts on Meta’s social media”
Starting May 7th, 2025.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
For about 20 years, the Dutch tax office used a home-brewed computer system (RAM) that brought the information about millions of taxpayers into one model. KPMG has looked at how the Belastingdienst used this system, and their findings are shocking.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: The Dutch Belastingdienst’s ‘Risk Analysis Model’”
Starting April 8th, 2025.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
For a while, when iPhone users dictated the word ‘racist’ to their phone, they shortly saw the word ‘Trump’ being written before it changed back to ‘racist’.
Continue reading “The phonetic overlap between ‘Trump’ and ‘racist’”
The LA Times is adding AI-written alternative points of view to opinion columns, editorials, and commentary. To the surprise of no one, this AI then diminished the hate-drivenness of the Ku Klux Klan as a movement.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: An LA Times AI tool defending the KKK”
Starting March 11th, 2025.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
If you want to send money to help the Palestinian cause, there is a high chance your payment might get blocked somewhere. Same thing if you want to make a game about the Palestine experience and are trying to get it published in the app stores.
Continue reading “In reaction to censorship and the genocide in Gaza, the Muslim community creates its own technological infrastructure”
Grok is the chatbot made by xAI, a startup founded by Elon Musk, and is the generative AI solution that is powering X (née Twitter). It has recently gained a new power to generate photorealistic images, including those of celebrities. This is a problem as its ‘guardrails’ are lacking: it willingly generates racist and other deeply problematic images.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Grok’s total lack of safeguards against generating racist content”
Starting February 11th, 2025.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
Amnesty takes a deep dive into the shameful racial and socio-economic discrimination against students in the DUO case (about which we’ve written here, here, and here) in their briefing titled Profiled Without Protection: Students in the Netherlands Hit By Discriminatory Fraud Detection System.
Continue reading “Amnesty demands the Dutch government stop using any and all risk profiling”
Starting January 15th, 2025.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
UC Berkeley recently discovered a fund established in 1975 to fund research into eugenics. Nowadays, our (avowed) perspective on this ideology has changed, so they repurposed the fund and commissioned a series on the legacies of eugenics for the LA Review of Books.
Continue reading “Ruha Benjamin on Eugenics 2.0”
An article in Nature shows how an AI approach can explain racial disparities in the experience of pain that standard radiographic measures of the severity of pain couldn’t see.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Deep learning algorithm shows the pain is in the knee after all”
Starting December 17th, 2024.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
We’ve written twice before about the racist impact of DUO’s student fraud detection efforts. The Dutch government has now decided to pay back all the fines and the study financing they held back for all students that were checked between 2012 and 2023.
Continue reading “Dutch government has to pay back 61 million euros to students who were discriminated against through DUO’s fraud profiling operation”
Banks have a requirement to ‘know their customers’ and to look for money laundering and the financing of terrorism. Their vigilante efforts lead to racist outcomes.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Anti-money laundering efforts by Dutch banks disproportionately affect people with a non-Western migration background”
Starting November 12th, 2024.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
None of the nearly 4,000 emojis feature afro hairstyles, grossly misrepresenting a large part of our world. Rise.365, a British community support group is trying to change that.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: No emojis feature hairstyles typically worn by Black people”
Starting October 15th, 2024.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
In its 2023 annual report, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (the Dutch Data Protection Authority) is dismayed by how much algorithmic discrimination it encounters while doing its oversight.
Continue reading “In the Netherlands, algorithmic discrimination is everywhere according to the Dutch Data Protection Authority”
An investigation by The Markup and Outlier Media shows how the law in Michigan allows car insurers to take location into account when deciding on a premium, penalizing the state’s Black population.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Michigan car insurers are allowed to charge a higher premium in Black neighbourhoods”
Starting September 17th, 2024.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
Using a very clever methodology, this year’s Digital Method Initiative Summer School participants show how generative AI models like OpenAI’s GTP-4o will “dress up” controversial topics when you push the model to work with controversial content, like war, protest, or porn.
Continue reading “Generative AI’s ability to ‘pink-wash’ Black and Queer protests”
In 2018, Lauren Rhue showed that two leading emotion detection software products had a racial bias against Black Men: Face++ thought they were more angry, and Microsoft AI thought they were more contemptuous.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: AI detection of emotion rates Black basketball players as ‘angrier’ than their White counterparts”
Starting July 23rd, 2024.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
The New York Times published a fascinating overview of the American census forms since the late 18th century. It shows how the form keeps trying to ‘capture’ the country’s demographics, “creating and reshaping the ever-changing views of racial and ethnic identity.”
Continue reading “The datafication of race and ethnicity”
Algorithm Watch experimented with three major generative AI tools, generating 8,700 images of politicians. They found that all these tools make an active effort to lessen bias, but that the way they attempt to do this is problematic.
Continue reading “How generative AI tools represent EU politicians: in a biased way”
Our own Hans de Zwart was a guest in the ‘Met Nerds om Tafel’ podcast. With Karen Palmer (creator of Consensus Gentium, a film about surveillance that watches you back), they discussed the role of art and storytelling in getting us ready for the future.
Continue reading “Podcast: Art as a prophetic activity for the future of AI”Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Baskerville 2 by Anders Noren.