AI4All is Changing the Face of Technology
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become inescapable in our everyday lives: from our virtual personal assistants Siri and Alexa to AI generated news articles to customer support. We have become so used to coexisting with AI we often don’t think about the design of the algorithms or question the results. Only when things go terribly wrong, such as when Google search for “Latina girls” revealing pornographic results or facial recognition software ignoring black faces, do we start to see the cracks in the code.
AI is the product of people. When only people of the same background have a hand in the design, their same implicit bias will be built right into the code. Facial recognition software from IBM, Microsoft, and Face++ did not work with black faces because the data set used to train the algorithm was overwhelmingly white and male. When the design team is also majority male and white, it isn’t likely that a homogenous dataset would be perceived as an issue. According to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commision, only 7.4% of the tech workforce is black and 8% is Latino. Without diversity in tech and collaborative teams from different perspectives, we end up with AI that simply continues to perpetuate the same racial bias that exists today.
That is why it is important that the Oakland-based nonprofit AI4All has received a $1 million grant from google.org to expand their AI summer camps for minority students. AI4All sponsors computer science summer camps at Stanford, Princeton, Cal, CMU, Simon Fraser and Boston University for high school students who identify as women, people of color, or low income. During the 2 week program, they build technical skills and complete projects in artificial intelligence. Since its inception in 2017, alumni from the program have been able to contribute their expertise to AI projects such as tracking wildfires in California and contributing to bail reform.
By bringing more Latinos into tech, we can instead see AI being used to change the status quo, to lift up minority communities and benefit all of us, not just some of us.
