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”
Deep learning models that allow you to make images from simple textual ‘prompts’ have recently become available for the general public. Having been trained on a world full of visual representations of social stereotypes, it comes as no surprise that these tools perpetuate a lot of biased and harmful imagery.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: AI-generated image tools amplify harmful stereotypes”
Diana Sardjoe writes for Fair Trials about how her sons were profiled by the Amsterdam police on the basis of risk models (a form of predictive policing) called ‘Top600’ (for adults) and ‘Top400’ for people aged 12 to 23). Because of this profiling her sons were “continually monitored and harassed by police.”
Continue reading “The devastating consequences of risk based profiling by the Dutch police”
‘Effective Altruism’ is all the vogue, but deeply problematic.
Continue reading “Beware of ‘Effective Altruism’ and ‘Longtermism’”
Sennay Ghebreab, head of the Civic AI Lab which aims to develop AI in a socially inclusive manner, was interviewed by Kustaw Bessems for the Volkskrant podcast Stuurloos (in Dutch).
Continue reading “Listen to Sennay Ghebreab for clarity about what AI should and shouldn’t do”
During the pandemic, Dutch student Robin Pocornie had to do her exams with a light pointing straight at her face. Her fellow students who were White didn’t have to do that. Her university’s surveillance software discriminated her, and that is why she has filed a complaint (read the full complaint in Dutch) with the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights.
Continue reading “Dutch student files complaint with the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights about the use of racist software by her university”
What is algorithmic discrimination, how is it caused and what can be done about it? These are the questions that are addressed in AlgorithmWatch’s newly published report Automated Decision-Making Systems and Discrimination.
Continue reading “A guidebook on how to combat algorithmic discrimination”
The Algemene Rekenkamer (Netherlands Court of Audit) looked into nine different algorithms used by the Dutch state. It found that only three of them fulfilled the most basic of requirements.
Continue reading “Shocking report by the Algemene Rekenkamer: state algorithms are a shitshow”
The MIT Technology Review has written a four-part series on how the impact of AI is “repeating the patterns of colonial history.” The Review is careful not to directly compare the current situation with the colonialist capturing of land, extraction of resources, and exploitation of people. Yet, they clearly show that AI does further enrich the wealthy at the tremendous expense of the poor.
Continue reading “Don’t miss this 4-part journalism series on ‘AI Colonialism’”
Platforms like Tiktok, Twitch and Instagram use algorithmic filters to automatically block certain posts on the basis of the language they use. The Washington Post shows how this has created ‘algospeak’, a whole new vocabulary. So instead of ‘dead’ users write ‘unalive’, they use ‘SA’ instead of ‘sexual assault’, and write ‘spicy eggplant’ rather than ‘vibrator’.
Continue reading “Inventing language to avoid algorithmic censorship”
The Racism and Technology Center co-signed an open letter asking the EU member states to make sure that the upcoming Digital Services Act will abolish so-called ‘dark patterns’ and advertising that is based on tracking and harvesting personal data.
Continue reading “72 civil society organisations to the EU: “Abolish tracking-based online advertising””
Around 2016 Facebook was still proud of its ability to target to “Black affinity” and “White affinity” adiences for the ads of their customers. I then wrote an op-ed decrying this form of racial profiling that was enabled by Facebook’s data lust.
Continue reading “Facebook has finally stopped enabling racial profiling for targeted advertising”
Traffic cameras that are used to automatically hand out speeding tickets don’t look at the colour of the person driving the speeding car. Yet, ProPublica has convincingly shown how cameras that don’t have a racial bias can still have a disparate racial impact.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: “Race-neutral” traffic cameras have a racially disparate impact”
We belief that software used for monitoring students during online tests (so-called proctoring software) should be abolished because it discriminates against students with a darker skin colour.
Continue reading “How our world is designed for the ‘reference man’ and why proctoring should be abolished”
We are happy to see that more and more attention is being paid to how technology intersects with problems around (racial) justice. Recently two new initiatives have launched that we would like to highlight.
Continue reading “Two new technology initiatives focused on (racial) justice”
AI should be seen as a new system technology, according to The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy, meaning that its impact is large, affects the whole of society, and is hard to predict. In their new Mission AI report, the Council lists five challenges for successfully embedding system technologies in society, leading to ten recommendations for governments.
Continue reading “Dutch Scientific Council knows: AI is neither neutral nor always rational”
In mid October 2021, the Allen Institute for AI launched Delphi, an AI in the form of a research prototype that is designed “to model people’s moral judgments on a variety of everyday situations.” In simple words: they made a machine that tries to do ethics.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: an AI for ethical advice turns out to be super racist”
Our very own Naomi Appelman was interviewed for Atlas, a Dutch television show about science and current affairs. She talked about her research into what laws and regulations democracies should develop to ensure that large technology companies don’t unnecessarily exclude people.
Continue reading “Regulating big tech to make sure nobody is excluded”
Policy makers are starting to understand that many systems running on AI exhibit some form of racial bias. So they are happy when computer scientists tell them that ‘debiasing’ is a solution for these problems: testing the system for racial and other forms of bias, and making adjustments until these no longer show up in the results.
Continue reading “Why ‘debiasing’ will not solve racist AI”
We have written about the racist cropping algorithm that Twitter uses, and have shared how Twitter tried to fix the symptoms. Twitter also instituted an ‘algorithmic bug bounty’, asking researchers to prove bias in their algorithms.
Continue reading “Proof for Twitter’s bias toward lighter faces”
Back in 2013, Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney was one of the first people to demonstrate racism (she called it ‘discrimination’) in online algorithms. She did this with her research on the ad delivery practices of Google.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Racist search engine ads”
Vox host Joss Fong wanted to know… “Why do we think tech is neutral? How do algorithms become biased? And how can we fix these algorithms before they cause harm?”
Continue reading “Are we automating racism?”
The Plug and Fast Company looked at what happened to the 3.8 billion dollars that US-based tech companies committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion as their response to the Black Lives Matter protests.
Continue reading “Tech companies poured 3.8 billion USD into racial justice, but to what avail?”
The following short video by Vox shows how white skin has always been the norm in photography. Black people didn’t start to look good on film until in the 1970s furniture makers complained to Kodak that their film didn’t render the difference between dark and light grained wood, and chocolate companies were upset that you couldn’t see the difference between dark and light chocolate.
Continue reading “Long overdue: Google has improved its camera app to work better for Black people”
In 2016, ProPublica investigated the fairness of COMPAS, a system used by the courts in the United States to assess the likelihood of a defendant committing another crime. COMPAS uses a risk assessment form to assess this risk of a defendant offending again. Judges are expected to take this risk prediction into account when they decide on sentencing.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Predicting future criminals with a bias against Black people”
Over the past couple of years, devices like our phones have become much harder to repair, and unauthorized repair often leads to a loss of warranty. This is partially driven by our manufactured need for devices that are slimmer and slicker, but is mostly an explicit strategy to make us throw away our old devices and have us buy new ones.
Continue reading “The right to repair our devices is also a social justice issue”
The Rekenkamer Rotterdam (a Court of Audit) looked at how the city of Rotterdam is using predictive algorithms and whether that use could lead to ethical problems. In their report, they describe how the city lacks a proper overview of the algorithms that it is using, how there is no coordination and thus no one takes responsibility when things go wrong, and how sensitive data (like nationality) were not used by one particular fraud detection algorithm, but that so-called proxy variables for ethnicity – like low literacy, which might correlate with ethnicity – were still part of the calculations. According to the Rekenkamer this could lead to unfair treatment, or as we would call it: ethnic profiling.
Continue reading “Rotterdam’s use of algorithms could lead to ethnic profiling”
Charlton McIlwain, author of the book Black Software, takes a good hard look at IBM in a longread for Logic magazine.
Continue reading “IBM is failing to increase diversity while successfully producing racist information technologies”
In 2015, when T.J. Fitzpatrick visited a conference in Atlanta, he wasn’t able to use any of the soap dispensers in the bathroom.
Continue reading “Racist technology in action: White only soap dispensers”Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Baskerville 2 by Anders Noren.