Category: Artificial Intelligence

Consensus and subjectivity of skin tone annotation for ML fairness

Skin tone is an observable characteristic that is subjective, perceived differently by individuals (e.g., depending on their location or culture) and thus is complicated to annotate. That said, the ability to reliably and accurately annotate skin tone is highly important in computer vision. This became apparent in 2018, when the Gender Shades study highlighted that computer vision systems struggled to detect people with darker skin tones, and performed particularly poorly for women with darker skin tones. The study highlights the importance for computer researchers and practitioners to evaluate their technologies across the full range of skin tones and at intersections of identities. Beyond evaluating model performance on skin tone, skin tone annotations enable researchers to measure diversity and representation in image retrieval systems, dataset collection, and image generation. For all of these applications, a collection of meaningful and inclusive skin tone annotations is key.

By Candice Schumann and Gbolahan O. Olanubi for Google AI Blog on May 15, 2023

Mean Images

An artist considers a new form of machinic representation: the statistical rendering of large datasets, indexed to the probable rather than the real of photography; to the uncanny composite rather than the abstraction of the graph.

By Hito Steyerl for New Left Review on April 28, 2023

Governments’ use of automated decision-making systems reflects systemic issues of injustice and inequality

In 2019, former UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston said he was worried we were “stumbling zombie-like into a digital welfare dystopia.” He had been researching how government agencies around the world were turning to automated decision-making systems (ADS) to cut costs, increase efficiency and target resources. ADS are technical systems designed to help or replace human decision-making using algorithms.

By Joanna Redden for Parental social licence for data linkage for service intervention on October 5, 2022

Hoe AI stigma’s van moslima’s versterkt en verspreidt

Je kunt tegenwoordig niet meer om AI heen. Of het nu om chatGPT gaat of om de app Lensa AI, wie zich in het digitale veld begeeft komt er vroeg of laat mee in aanraking. De balans opmaken op de vraag ‘is AI goed of slecht?’ is lastig, zeker omdat het nog niet zo wijdverbreid gebruikt wordt. Maar als we de experts mogen geloven, gaat dat in de toekomst anders zijn. De hoogste tijd voor de prijswinnende fotograaf Cigdem Yuksel om te onderzoeken wat het gebruik van AI betekent voor de beeldvorming van moslima’s. Lilith Magazine sprak met Yuksel en met Laurens Vreekamp, schrijver van the Art of AI.

By Aimée Dabekaussen, Cigdem Yuksel and Laurens Vreekamp for Lilith on April 6, 2023

What problems are AI-systems even solving? “Apparently, too few people ask that question”

A portrait photo of Felienne Hermans

In this interview with Felienne Hermans, Professor Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, she discusses the sore lack of divesity in the white male-dominated world of programming, the importance of teaching people how to code and, the problematic uses of AI-systems.

Continue reading “What problems are AI-systems even solving? “Apparently, too few people ask that question”” →

Onze toekomst op de voorwaarden van Big Tech

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

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

Stories of everyday life with AI in the global majority

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.

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Inside the Suspicion Machine

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

Kunstmatige intelligentie moet in de pas marcheren van mensenrechten

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

Parables of AI in/from the Majority World: An Anthology

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

We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it.

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 quantify 100 years of gender and ethnic stereotypes

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 cheap, racialised, Kenyan workers making ChatGPT “safe”

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.

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Quantifying bias in society with ChatGTP-like tools

The book cover of the Alightment Poblem: Machine Learning and Human Values, by Brian Christian. Has unaligned wires and aligned wires.

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.

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Alliance Against Military AI

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

The Costs of Connection – How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating it for Capitalism

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

Racist Technology in Action: Let’s make an avatar! Of sexy women and tough men of course

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” →

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