Bloomberg did a clever experiment: they had OpenAI’s GPT rank resumes and found that it shows a gender and racial bias just on the basis of the name of the candidate.
Continue reading “OpenAI’s GPT sorts resumes with a racial bias”
Starting April 2nd, 2024.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
In a shallow attempt to do representation for representation’s sake, Google has managed to draw the ire of the right-wing internet by generating historically inaccurate and overly inclusive portraits of historical figures.
Continue reading “Google does performative identity politics, nonpologises, pauses their efforts, and will invariably move on to its next shitty moneymaking move”
Robin Aisha Pocornie’s case should by now be familiar for regular readers of our Center’s work. Robin has now told this story in her own voice at TEDxAmsterdam.
Continue reading “Robin Aisha Pocornie’s TEDx talk: “Error 404: Human Face Not Found””
Students are using ChatGPT for writing their essays. Antiplagiarism tools are trying to detect whether a text was written by AI. It turns out that these type of detectors consistently misclassify the text of non-native speakers as AI-generated.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: ChatGPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers”
Starting March 5th, 2024.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
In October last year, RTL news showed that Proctorio’s software, used to check if students aren’t cheating during online exams, works less for students of colour. Five months later, RTL asked the twelve Dutch educational institutions on Proctorio’s client list whether they were still using the tool. Eight say they still do.
Continue reading “Dutch Higher Education continues to use inequitable proctoring software”
There is now a single point to report cases of discrimination. In a simple web form, you can make a report for yourself or somebody else, and you can do this anonymously if you want to.
Continue reading “Anti-discrimination agencies have launched a single point of contact for reporting discrimination in the Netherlands”
Investigative reporting by The Markup showed how U.S. internet providers offer wildly different internet speeds for the same monthly fee. The neighbourhoods with the worst deals had lower median incomes and were very often the least White.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Slower internet service for the same price in U.S. lower income areas with fewer White residents”
Starting February 6th, 2024.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
Even though the Dutch tax office (the Belastingdienst) was advised to immediately stop the use of three risk profiling algorithms, the office decided to continue their use, according to this reporting by Follow the Money.
Continue reading “Dutch Tax Office keeps breaking the law with their risk profiling algorithms”
Starting January 9th, 2024.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
Starting November 27th, 2023.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
On October 17th, the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights ruled that the VU did not discriminate against bioinformatics student Robin Pocornie on the basis of race by using anti-cheating software. However, according to the institute, the VU has discriminated on the grounds of race in how they handled her complaint.
Continue reading “Judgement of the Dutch Institute for Human Rights shows how difficult it is to legally prove algorithmic discrimination”
Starting October 28th, 2023.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
Respondus, a vendor of online proctoring software, has been granted a patent for their “systems and methods for assessing data collected by automated proctoring.” The patent shows that their example method for calculating a risk score is adjusted on the basis of people’s skin colour.
Continue reading “Proctoring software uses fudge-factor for dark skinned students to adjust their suspicion score”
In its online series of digital dilemmas, Al Jazeera takes a look at AI in relation to social inequities. Loyal readers of this newsletter will recognise many of the examples they touch on, like how Stable Diffusion exacerbates and amplifies racial and gender disparities or the Dutch childcare benefits scandal.
Continue reading “Al Jazeera asks: Can AI eliminate human bias or does it perpetuate it?”
Starting September 30th, 2023.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
The police in America is using facial recognition software to match security footage of crimes to people. Kashmir Hill describes for the New York Times another example of a wrong match leading to a wrongful arrest.
Continue reading “Another false facial recognition match: pregnant woman wrongfully arrested”
For many years the Dutch police has used a risk modeling algorithm to predict the chance that an individual suspect will commit a violent crime. Follow the Money exposed the total lack of a moral, legal, and statistical justification for its use, and now the police has stopped using the system.
Continue reading “Dutch police used algorithm to predict violent behaviour without any safeguards”
Starting September 2nd, 2023.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
Scientific research on the quality of face detection systems keeps finding the same result: no matter how, when, and with which system testing is done, every time it is found that faces of people with a darker skin tone are not detected as well as the faces of people with a lighter skin tone.
Continue reading “Current state of research: Face detection still has problems with darker faces”
When Aura Bogado was playing Pokémon Go in a much Whiter neighbourhood than the one where she lived, she noticed how many more PokéStops were suddenly available. She then crowdsourced locations of these stops and found out, with the Urban Institute think tank, that there were on average 55 PokéStops in majority White neighbourhoods and 19 in neighbourhoods that were majority Black.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: How Pokéman Go inherited existing racial inequities”
Starting August 5th, 2023.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
DUO is the Dutch organisation for administering student grants. It uses an algorithm to help them decide which students get a home visit to check for fraudulent behaviour. Turns out they basically only check students of colour, and they have no clue why.
Continue reading “Algorithm to help find fraudulent students turns out to be racist”
Starting July 8th, 2023.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
Google wants to “help computers ‘see’ our world”, and one of their ways of battling how current AI and machine learning systems perpetuate biases is to introduce a more inclusive scale of skin tone, the ‘Monk Skin Tone Scale’.
Continue reading “Representing skin tone, or Google’s hubris versus the simplicity of Crayola”
Starting June 10th, 2023.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
Robin Pocornie’s complaint against the VU for their use of Proctorio, which had trouble detecting her face as a person of colour, is part of larger and international story as an article in Wired shows.
Continue reading “Doing an exam as if “driving at night with a car approaching from the other direction with its headlights on full-beam””
Ignoring earlier Dutch failures in automated decision making, and ignoring advice from its own experts, the Dutch ministry of Foreign Affairs has decided to cut costs and cut corners through implementing a discriminatory profiling system to process visa applications.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: You look similar to someone we didn’t like → Dutch visa denied”
Starting May 13th, 2023.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
In this piece on Medium, Jenka Gurfinkel writes about a Reddit user who has asked Midjourney, a generative AI to do the following:
Continue reading “How AIs collapse our history and culture into a monolithic perspective”Imagine a time traveler journeyed to various times and places throughout human history and showed soldiers and warriors of the periods what a “selfie” is.
Starting April 15th, 2023.
Continue reading “Events, exhibits and other things to do”
The current wave of reporting on the AI-bubble has one advantage: it also creates a bit of space in the media to write about how AI reflects the existing inequities in our society.
Continue reading “Work related to the Racism and Technology Center is getting media attention”
The algorithm that the city of Rotterdam used to predict the risk of welfare fraud fell into the hands of journalists. Turns out that the system was biased against marginalised groups like young mothers and people who don’t have Dutch as their first language.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Rotterdam’s welfare fraud prediction algorithm was biased”
Robin Pocornie was featured in the Dutch current affairs programme EenVandaag. Professor Sennay Ghebreab and former Member of Parliament Kees Verhoeven provided expertise and commentary.
Continue reading “First Dutch citizen proves that an algorithm discriminated against her on the basis of her skin colour”
ChatGPT is an implementation of a so-called ‘large language model’. These models are trained on text from the internet at large. This means that these models inherent the bias that exists in our language and in our society. This has an interesting consequence: it suddenly becomes possible to see how bias changes through the times in a quantitative and undeniable way.
Continue reading “Quantifying bias in society with ChatGTP-like tools”
In a roundtable on artificial intelligence in the Dutch Parliament, Quirine Eijkman spoke on behalf of the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights about Robin Pocornie’s case against the discriminatory use of Proctiorio at the VU university.
Continue reading “Dutch Institute for Human Rights speaks about Proctorio at Dutch Parliament”
Dutch student Robin Pocornie filed a complaint with Dutch Institute for Human Rights. The surveillance software that her university used, had trouble recognising her as human being because of her skin colour. After a hearing, the Institute has now ruled that Robin has presented enough evidence to assume that she was indeed discriminated against. The ball is now in the court of the VU (her university) to prove that the software treated everybody the same.
Continue reading “Dutch Institute for Human Rights: Use of anti-cheating software can be algorithmic discrimination (i.e. racist)”
DoNotPay is a ‘robot lawyer’ service, allowing its customers (regular citizens) to automatically do things like fighting parking tickets, getting refunds on flight tickets, or auto-cancelling their free trials. Earlier this year, it expanded its service to include finding and helping remove racist language in housing documents.
Continue reading “Auto-detecting racist language in housing documents”Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Baskerville 2 by Anders Noren.