The journalist and academic says the bias encoded in artificial intelligence systems can’t be fixed with better data alone – the change has to be societal.
By Meredith Broussard and Zoë Corbyn for The Guardian on March 26, 2023
Programmeren is een mannending, nog altijd. Hoogleraar computerwetenschappen Felienne Hermans wil daarin verandering brengen. Ondertussen ligt ze ’s nachts wakker van het brede arsenaal aan ellende dat nieuwe AI-toepassingen als ChatGPT teweegbrengen.
By Felienne Hermans and Laurens Verhagen for Volkskrant on March 16, 2023
Deze aflevering staat in het teken van het onderzoek The Public Interest vs. Big Tech. Dit gaat over het gedoe waar maatschappelijke organisaties mee te maken krijgen door de macht van grote techbedrijven over hun communicatie. Inge gaat in gesprek met Evelyn, Lotje en Ramla over dit onderzoek, dat we samen met vier burgerbewegingen en met Pilp (het Public Interest Litigation Project) deden. We bellen in met Oumaima Hajri. Zij heeft, in samenwerking met the Racism and Technology Center, een alliantie opgestart die zich inzet tegen de militarisering van AI.
By Evely Austin, Inge Wannet, Lotje Beek and Oumaima Hajri for Bits of Freedom on March 17, 2023
You are not a parrot. And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this.
By Elizabeth Weil and Emily M. Bender for New York Magazine on March 1, 2023
This collection by the Data & Society Research Institute sheds an intimate and grounded light on what impact AI-systems can have. The guiding question that connects all of the 13 non-fiction pieces in Parables of AI in/from the Majority world: An Anthology is what stories can be told about a world in which solving societal issues is more and more dependent on AI-based and data-driven technologies? The book, edited by Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, Ranjit Singh and Patrick Davison, through narrating ordinary, everyday experiences in the majority world, slowly disentangles the global and unequally distributed impact of digital technologies.
Continue reading “Stories of everyday life with AI in the global majority”
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 AI-fueled chatbot gives answers that can seem human-sounding. They may also share humans’ bias.
From CBS News on March 6, 2023
Obscure government algorithms are making life-changing decisions about millions of people around the world. Here, for the first time, we reveal how one of these systems works.
By Dhruv Mehrotra, Eva Constantaras, Gabriel Geiger, Htet Aung and Justin-Casimir Braun for WIRED on March 6, 2023
Volgens OpenAI en Google kan kunstmatige intelligentie de hele mensheid ten goede komen. Maar uit onderzoek blijkt hoe eenzijdig en beperkt de meeste data zijn waarmee AI is getraind. Volgens onderzoeker Balázs Bodó is dat reden om op de grote rode pauzeknop te drukken.
By Balázs Bodó and Maurits Martijn for De Correspondent on February 22, 2023
Nederland wil graag een voorloper zijn in het gebruik van kunstmatige intelligentie in militaire situaties. Deze technologie kan echter leiden tot racisme en discriminatie. In een open brief roepen critici op tot een moratorium op het gebruik van kunstmatige intelligentie. Initiatiefnemer Oumaima Hajri legt uit waarom.
By Oumaima Hajri for De Kanttekening on February 22, 2023
Encounters with data and AI require contending with the uncertainties of systems that are most often understood through their inputs and outputs. Storytelling is one way to reckon with and make sense of these uncertainties. So what stories can we tell about a world that has increasingly come to rely on AI-based, data-driven interventions to address social problems?
By Patrick Davison, Ranjit Singh and Rigoberto Lara Guzmán for Data & Society on December 7, 2022
Large language models (LLMs) like the GPT family learn the statistical structure of language by optimising their ability to predict missing words in sentences (as in ‘The cat sat on the [BLANK]’). Despite the impressive technical ju-jitsu of transformer models and the billions of parameters they learn, it’s still a computational guessing game. ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a ‘bullshit generator’.
By Dan McQuillan for Dan McQuillan on February 6, 2023
Word embeddings are a popular machine-learning method that represents each English word by a vector, such that the geometry between these vectors captures semantic relations between the corresponding words. We demonstrate that word embeddings can be used as a powerful tool to quantify historical trends and social change. As specific applications, we develop metrics based on word embeddings to characterize how gender stereotypes and attitudes toward ethnic minorities in the United States evolved during the 20th and 21st centuries starting from 1910. Our framework opens up a fruitful intersection between machine learning and quantitative social science.
By Dan Jurafsky, James Zou, Londa Schiebinger and Nikhil Garg for PNAS on April 3, 2018
The past week the Dutch goverment hosted and organised the military AI conference REAIM 2023. Together with eight other NGOs we signed an open letter, initated by Oumaima Hajri, that calls on the Dutch government to stop promoting narratives of “innovation” and “opportunities” but, rather, centre the very real and often disparate human impact.
Continue reading “An alliance against military AI”
Stories about the hidden and exploitative racialised labour which fuels the development of technologies continue to surface, and this time it is on ChatGPT. Billy Perrigo, who previously reported on Meta’s content moderation sweatshop and on whistleblower Daniel Moutang, who took Meta to court, has shed light on how OpenAI has relied upon outsourced exploitative labour in Kenya to make ChatGPT less toxic.
Continue reading “The cheap, racialised, Kenyan workers making ChatGPT “safe””
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”
Civil society organisations urge the Dutch government to immediately establish a moratorium on developing AI systems in the military domain.
By Oumaima Hajri for Alliantie tegen militaire AI on February 15, 2023
A profound exploration of how the ceaseless extraction of information about our intimate lives is remaking both global markets and our very selves. The Costs of Connection represents an enormous step forward in our collective understanding of capitalism’s current stage, a stage in which the final colonial input is the raw data of human life. Challenging, urgent and bracingly original.
By Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias for Colonized by Data
Je zult de populaire chatbot ChatGPT niet snel betrappen op vieze woordjes of racistische taal. Hij is keurig getraind door tientallen Kenianen. Hun taak: het algoritme leren vooral niet te beginnen over moord, marteling en verkrachting, zodat wij – de gebruikers – geen smerige drek voorgeschoteld krijgen.
By Maurits Martijn for De Correspondent on January 28, 2023
OpenAI used outsourced workers in Kenya earning less than $2 per hour to scrub toxicity from ChatGPT.
By Billy Perrigo for Time on January 18, 2023
Just upload a selfie in the “AI avatar app” Lensa and it will generate a digital portrait of you. Think, for example, of a slightly more fit or beautiful version of yourself as an astronaut or the lead singer in a band. If you are a man that is. As it turns out, for women, and especially women with Asian heritage, Lensa churns out pornified, sexy and skimpily clothed avatars.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Let’s make an avatar! Of sexy women and tough men of course”
Unsurprisingly, the artistic and ethical shortcomings of AI image generators are tied to their dependence on capital and capitalism.
By Marco Donnarumma for Hyperallergic on October 24, 2022
My avatars were cartoonishly pornified, while my male colleagues got to be astronauts, explorers, and inventors.
By Melissa Heikkilä for MIT Technology Review on December 12, 2022
When large language models fall short, the consequences can be serious. Why is it so hard to acknowledge that?
By Abeba Birhane and Deborah Raji for WIRED on December 9, 2022
This is according to experts at the University of Cambridge, who suggest that current portrayals and stereotypes about AI risk creating a “racially homogenous”.
By Kanta Dihal and Stephen Cave for University of Cambridge on August 6, 2020
Social media app, Spill, designed by former Twitter employees, Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell and DeVaris Brown, is becoming the chosen alternative for many.
By Kumba Kpakima for POCIT on December 21, 2022
Filters appear to be bypassed with simple tricks, and superficially masked. And what is lurking inside is egregious.
By Steven t. Piantadosi for Twitter on December 4, 2022
We are a non-profit creating more realistic and inclusive images of artificial intelligence. Visit our growing repository available for anyone to use for free under CC licences, or just to use as inspiration for more helpful and diverse representations of AI.
From Better Images of AI
Current methods to mitigate these effects fail to prevent images perpetuating racist, misogynist and otherwise problematic stereotypes.
By Justin Hendrix for Tech Policy Press on November 9, 2022
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”
Galactica language model generated convincing text about fact and nonsense alike.
By Benj Edwards for Ars Technica on November 18, 2022
I asked it to write about linguistic prejudice.
By Rikker Dockum for Twitter on November 16, 2022
Galactica was supposed to help scientists. Instead, it mindlessly spat out biased and incorrect nonsense.
By Will Douglas Heaven for MIT Technology Review on November 18, 2022
This fantastic article by Williams, Miceli and Gebru, describes how the methodological shift of AI systems to deep-learning-based models has required enormous amounts of “data” for models to learn from. Large volumes of time-consuming work, such as labelling millions of images, can now be broken down into smaller tasks and outsourced to data labourers across the globe. These data labourers have terribly low wagen, often working in dire working conditions.
Continue reading “AI innovation for whom, and at whose expense?”
‘Effective Altruism’ is all the vogue, but deeply problematic.
Continue reading “Beware of ‘Effective Altruism’ and ‘Longtermism’”
Capitol Music Group faced a backlash for signing the artificial intelligence musician.
From BBC on August 24, 2022
A resource by Sareeta Amrute, Ranjit Singh, and Rigoberto Lara Guzmán exploring the presence of artificial intelligence and technology in the Majority World. 160 thematic works, available in English and Spanish.
By Ranjit Singh, Rigoberto Lara Guzmán and Sareeta Amrute for Data & Society on September 14, 2022
Supporting transnational worker organizing should be at the center of the fight for “ethical AI.”
By Adrienne Williams, Milagros Miceli and Timnit Gebru for Noema on October 13, 2022
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”
Socialism is the most effective altruism. Who needs anything else? The repugnant philosophy of “Effective Altruism” offers nothing to movements for global justice.
By Nathan J. Robinson for Current Affairs on September 19, 2022
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