Reflection on the article "Gender and AI: Addressing bias in artificial intelligence"

Gender and AI, by InternationalWomensDay.com

In the link above, writers from International Womens Day explore the racial/gender bias' that Artificial Intelligence (AI) machines are inheriting from their mainly white and male programmers. AI and other technologies are often times thought of as being unbiased machines, but the reality is they are dependent on learning and schooling, just like a young human mind. The database and instances that the AI algorithm are fed dictate it's understanding of the world and how to replicate it. The article says- "AI appears neutral, but it's made by humans, which means it internalizes all the same bias as we have - including gender bias... AI is a mirror of ourselves."

The Harvard Review has many examples of gender biases in AI creations. And in the same article referenced above, Frida Polli says, “Can you imagine if all the toddlers in the world were raised by 20-year-old men? That’s what our A.I. looks like today. It’s being built by a very homogenous group,".

That all in context I was interested to see what some AI machines would come up with while using some search query keywords from our class. 

I began by exploring an art based AI generator, The Midjourney Bot available on discord- https://discord.com/invite/midjourney

Midjourney bot is a machine that "uses a machine learning algorithm trained on a huge amount of image data to produce unique images." (Images provided by a certain group of humans working at the company).

How it works is, you type: "/imagine (prompt ________ )" Whatever prompt you would like. The AI takes the words and runs four slightly difference algorithms to produce for you four different image options.

In this instance I try four different search query keywords, the terms and their associated AI generated images appear below: 

Gender

Interesting to note the race of all generated images are white people. Classic western cis het male and female appear in the first two. I was surprised that the bottom two images display androgenous features.

Development

Again the theme of whiteness is seen but despite that it presents striking images of cityscapes and the undeniable intertwining of humans and environment and human construction.

Gender and Development
Interestingly this the first time we see people of color represented by the AI, and it comes out with this combination of words, evidently influenced by the current idea of that term being associated with 20th and 21st century "development" efforts that are associated racialized within the context of the "global north and south".

Modernization

Finally, for fun I figured I would check out modernization, and I was not disappointed! The machine conjured up some cool cyber punk dystopian future people and whale buildings. 

All of these images were influenced by the images the AI's originally were fed and the new ones they are given daily by users. Going forward it will be of particular importance that the field of Artificial Intelligence has participation and creation that is ultra diverse and representative of the spectrum of humanity.