Art of Life/Donna Parker
Can Artificial Intelligence Be Weaponized Against People Of Color
Artificial Intelligence is the phrase of the moment, right? First, exactly what is “Artificial Intelligence”? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the science of making machines that can think like humans. It can do things that are considered "smart." AI technology can process large amounts of data in ways that humans can’t. The goal for AI is to be able to do things such as recognize patterns, make decisions, and judge like humans.
Artificial Intelligence touches almost every aspect of our lives, from mobile banking and online shopping to social media and real-time traffic maps. But what happens when artificial intelligence is biased? What if it makes mistakes on important decisions — from who gets a job interview or a mortgage to who gets arrested and how much time they ultimately serve for a crime?
From politicians to scientists to tech billionaires, it seems like everyone is scrambling to better understand how this new technology can impact all of our daily lives — for better or for worse. And right now, there does seem to be more questions than answers. For example, one concern is how the massive amount of information gathered by AI is incorporated into technologies that could perpetuate racism, sexism and other biases.
A growing body of research, indicates that bias in Artificial Intelligence can lead to biased outcomes, especially for people of color and women. Facial recognition technologies, for example, have come under increasing scrutiny because they have been shown to better detect white faces than they do the faces of people with darker skin. They also do a better job of detecting men’s faces than those of women.
However, sometimes new technology can work against African Americans. A lawsuit filed in Atlanta this month is drawing attention to how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being weaponized against Black people by law enforcement. According to NBC News, on Sept. 8, Randal Quran Reid, a Black man, filed a lawsuit in federal court that alleges he was arrested using AI that identified him as a man wanted for crimes in Louisiana. But Reid said he has never visited Louisiana and blames the misuse of facial recognition technology for his false arrest.
We have already seen glimpses of what might be on the horizon. Programs developed by companies at the forefront of AI research have resulted in a string of errors that look uncannily like the darker biases of humanity: a Google image recognition program labeled the faces of several Black people as gorillas; a Linked-In advertising program showed a preference for male names in searches, and a Microsoft chatbot called Tay spent a day learning from Twitter and began spouting antisemitic messages.
Although the use of facial recognition technology is gaining steam among law enforcement, studies have shown that the algorithms fuel racial profiling. Black Americans are more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts, which means they are overrepresented in mugshot data.
The same data is used by facial recognition algorithms. In turn, the algorithm creates the same biases as the White developers who created it. In fact, a study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that these types of facial recognition algorithms work best at recognizing middle-aged white men. The error rates were highest for Black people, especially Black women.
In fact, concern about bias in facial recognition technologies led to a number of bans on their use. In June 2019, San Francisco was among the first cities in the nation to ban the use of facial recognition technologies by the police and other city departments. The state of California followed suit in January 2020, imposing a three-year moratorium on the use of facial recognition technology in police body cameras.
The rise of artificial intelligence is ushering in a new era that holds a wealth of possibilities, but with the growth of AI, there is also some cause for concern.
