Laat ik de vraag specificeren voor mijn vakgebied: zijn besluiten die door technologie worden genomen rechtvaardig? Verdien je de beslissing die uit de machine rolt?
Continue reading “Uit Vrij Nederland: Krijgen we wat we verdienen?”
The immanent demise of Twitter after Elon Musk’s takeover sparked an exodus of people leaving the platform, which is only expected to increase. The significant increase in hate speech, and general hostile atmosphere created by the erratic decrees by it’s owner (such as Trump’s reinstatement) made, in the New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb’s words, “remaining completely untenable”. This, often vocal, movement of people from the platform has sparked a debate on what people stand to loose and what the alternative is.
Continue reading “What’s at stake with losing (Black) Twitter and moving to (white) Mastodon?”
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”
Tiera Tanksley’s work seeks to better understand how forms of digitally mediated traumas, such as seeing images of Black people dead and dying on social media, are impacting Black girls’ mental and emotional wellness in the U.S. and Canada. Her fears were confirmed in her findings: Black girls report unprecedented levels of fear, depression, anxiety and chronic stress. Viewing Black people being killed by the state was deeply traumatic, with mental, emotional and physiological effects.
Continue reading “Profiting off Black bodies”
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”
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)”
A critical, in depth report on Top400 – a crime prevention project by the Amsterdam municipality – which targets and polices minors (between the ages of 12 to 23) has emphasised the stigmatising, discriminatory, and invasive effects of the Top400 on youths and their families.
Continue reading “Amsterdam’s Top400 project stigmatises and over-criminalises youths”
The UK organisation No Tech for Tyrants (NT4T) has published an extensive report on the use of surveillance technologies by the police in the UK, US, Mexico, Brazil, Denmark and India, in collaboration with researchers and activists from these countries. The report, titled “Surveillance Tech Perpetuates Police Abuse of Power” examines the relation between policing and technology through in-depth case studies.
Continue reading “Report: How police surveillance tech reinforces abuses of power”
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”
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’”
In this bizarre yet unsurprising example of an AI-gone-wrong (or “rogue”), an artificially designed robot rapper, FN Meka, has been dropped by Capitol Music Group for racial slurs and the use of the N-word in his music.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Robot rapper spouts racial slurs and the N-word”
Silicon Valley strikes again, with yet another techno-solutionist idea. Sanas, a speech technology startup founded by three former Stanford students, aims to alter the accents of call centre workers situated in countries such as India and the Philippines. The goal is to make them sound white and American. With a slide of a button, a call centre’s voice will be transformed into a slightly robotic, and unmistakeably white, American voice.
Continue reading “Whitewashing call centre workers’ accents”
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”
A recent study in robotics has drawn attention from news media such as The Washington Post and VICE. In this study, researchers programmed virtual robots with popular artificial intelligence algorithms. Then, these robots were asked to scan blocks containing pictures of people’s faces and make decisions to put some blocks into a virtual “box” according to an open-ended instruction. In the experiments, researchers quickly found out that these robots repeatedly picked women and people of color to be put in the “box” when they were asked to respond to words such as “criminal”, “homemaker”, and “janitor”. The behaviors of these robots showed that sexist and racist baises coded in AI algorithms have leaked into the field of robotics.
Continue reading “AI-trained robots bring algorithmic biases into robotics”
One of the classic examples of how AI systems can reinforce social injustice is Amazon’s A.I. hiring tool. In 2014, Amazon built an ´A.I. powered´ tool to assess resumes and recommend the top candidates that would go on to be interviewed. However, the tool turned out to be very biased, systematically preferring men over women.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: How hiring tools can be sexist and racist”
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”
In his New York Times article, Mike Isaac describes how Meta is implementing a new system to automatically check whether the housing, employment and credit ads it hosts are shown to people equally. This is a move following a 111,054 US dollar fine the US Justice Department has issued Meta because its ad systems have been shown to discriminate its users by, amongst other things, excluding black people from seeing certain housing ads in predominately white neighbourhoods. This is the outcome of a long process, which we have written about previously.
Continue reading “Meta forced to change its advertisement algorithm to address algorithmic discrimination”
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”
In 2019, a Facebook content moderator in Nairobi, Daniel Motaung, who was paid USD 2.20 per hour, was fired. He was working for one of Meta’s largest outsourcing partners in Africa, Sama, which brands itself as an “ethical AI” outsourcing company, and is headquartered in California. Motaung led a unionisation attempt with more than 100 colleagues, fighting for better wages and working conditions.
Continue reading “Exploited and silenced: Meta’s Black whistleblower in Nairobi”
An example of racial bias in machine learning strikes again, this time by a program called PULSE, as reported by The Verge. Input a low resolution image of Barack Obama – or another person of colour such as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez or Lucy Liu – and the resulting AI-generated output of a high resolution image, is distinctively a white person.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Turning a Black person, White”
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 KNVB (Royal Dutch Football Association) is taking a tech approach at tackling racist fan behaviour during matches, an approach that stands a great risk of falling in the techno solutionism trap.
Continue reading “‘Smart’ techologies to detect racist chants at Dutch football matches”
In this interview with OneWorld, Nani Jansen Reventlow reflects on the harmful uses of technology, perpetuated by private and public actors. Ranging from the Dutch child benefits scandal, to the use of proctoring in education and to ‘super SyRI’ in public services.
Continue reading “Centring communities in the fight against injustice”
Where people’s notion of beauty is often steeped in cultural preferences or plain prejudice, the objectivity of an AI-system would surely allow it to access a more universal conception of beauty – or so thought the developers of Beauty.AI. Alex Zhavoronkov, who consulted in the development of the Beaut.AI-system, described the dystopian motivation behind the system clearly: “Humans are generally biased and there needs to be a robot to provide an impartial opinion. Beauty.AI is the first step in a much larger story, in which a mobile app trained to evaluate perception of human appearance will evolve into a caring personal assistant to help users look their best and retain their youthful looks.”
Continue reading “Racist Techology in Action: Beauty is in the eye of the AI”
Investigative journalism of the NRC brought to light that the Dutch NCTV (the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security) uses fake social media accounts to track Dutch activists. The agency also targets activists working in the social justice or anti-discrimination space and tracks their work, sentiments and movements through their social media accounts. This is a clear example of how digital communication allows governments to intensify their surveillance and criminalisation of political opinions outside the mainstream.
Continue reading “The Dutch government wants to continue to spy on activists’ social media”
In this op-ed, Sydette Harry unpacks how the tech sector, particularly tech journalism, has largely failed to meaningfully listen and account for the experiences of Black women, a group that most often bears the brunt of the harmful and racist effects of technological “innovations”. While the role of tech journalism is supposedly to hold the tech industry accountable through access and insight, it has repeatedly failed to include Black people in their reporting, neither by hiring Black writers nor by addressing them seriously as an audience. Rather, their experiences and culture are often co-opted, silenced, unreported, and pushed out of newsrooms.
Continue reading “Silencing Black women in tech journalism”
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’”
In this piece, Julian Posada writes about a family of five in Venezuela, who synchronise their routines so that there will always be two people at the computer working for a crowdsourcing platform to make a living. They earn a few cents per task in a cryptocurrency and are only allowed to cash out once they’ve made at least the equivalent of USD 10. On average they earn about USD 20 per week, but their earnings can be erratic, resulting in extreme stress and precarity.
Continue reading “Exploitative labour is central to the infrastructure of AI”
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”
Our own Jill Toh recently presented at a symposium on the use of technology and how it intersects with racism in the context of housing and policing. She spoke on a panel organised in the contex of the World Roma Day 2022 titled Technolution: Yearned-for Hopes or Old Injustices?.
Continue reading “Technology, Racism and Justice at Roma Day 2022”
The development and use of AI and machine learning in healthcare is proliferating. A 2020 study has shown that chest X-ray datasets that are used to train diagnostic models are biased against certain racial, gender and socioeconomic groups.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Chest X-ray classifiers exhibit racial, gender and socio-economic bias”
Last week in the Netherlands all focus was on the municipal elections. Last Wednesday, the city councils were chosen that will govern for the next four years. The elections this year were mainly characterised by a historical low turnout and the traditional overall wins for local parties. However, the focus of the Racism and Technology Center is, of course, on whether the new municipal councils and governments will put issues on the intersection of social justice and technology on the agenda.
Continue reading “Racism and technology in the Dutch municipal elections”
In this issue of Logic, issue editor, J. Khadijah Abdurahman and André Brock Jr., associate professor of Black Digital Studies at Georgia Institute of Technology and the author of Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures converse about the history of disinformation from reconstruction to the present, and discuss “the unholy trinity of whiteness, modernity, and capitalism”.
Continue reading “Disinformation and anti-Blackness”
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””
‘Oximeters’ are small medical devices used to measure levels of oxygen in someone’s blood. The oximeter can be clipped over someones finger and uses specific frequences of light beamed through the skin to measure the saturation of oxygen in the blood.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Oxygen meters designed for white skin”
The Racism and Technology Center organised a panel titled Centering social injustice, de-centering tech: The case of the Dutch child benefits scandal and beyond at Privacy Camp 2022, a conference that brings together digital rights advocates, activists, academics and policymakers. Together with Merel Koning (Amnesty International), Nadia Benaissa (Bits of Freedom) and Sanne Stevens (Justice, Equity and Technology Table), the discussion used the Dutch child benefits scandal as an example to highlight issues of deeply rooted racism and discrimination in the public sector. The fixation on algorithms and automated decision-making systems tends to obscure these fundamental problems. Often, the use of technology by governments functions to normalise and rationalise existing racist and classist practices.
Continue reading “Centering social injustice, de-centering tech”
In an official parliamentary investigative committee, the Dutch Senate is investigating how new regulation or law-making processes can help combat discrimination in the Netherlands. The focus of the investigative committee is on four broad domains: labour market, education, social security and policing. As a part of these wide investigative efforts the senate is hearing from a range of experts and civil society organisations. Most notably, one contribution stands out from the perspective of racist technology: Nadia Benaissa from Bits of Freedom highlighted the dangers of predictive policing and other uses of automated systems in law enforcement.
Continue reading “Bits of Freedom speaks to the Dutch Senate on discriminatory algorithms”Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Baskerville 2 by Anders Noren.