I’ve used apps that thought I was a monkey but it recognized white people just fine, I’ve seen racist chat bots go on about how much they love hitler and hate black people, I’ve saw ai generated photos that produced racist depictions. What I’m wondering is it the developers making the ai racist or is it the code itself that is racist? I don’t believe that any machine has reached sentience obviously, but I have no doubt in my mind that all ai I have experienced is racist, all I ask is why?
Chatbots are constantly used by 4chan nerds that teach them to be racist.
Yeah that’s the actual answer. I think a lot of chat bots just learn from conversation. So you have a bunch of 4chan trolls come in and spam slurs at it and there you go.
Not recognizing black skin though is the developers not having any black people on their team or just not giving a shit.
Trchbros use biased input data, are too lazy to do the research to avoid this, and are often racist themselves in the questions they choose to raise.
Even when these things aren’t true, they’re systemically promoted because the marketing promise of AI is that you get high quality models without having to do all that researching and science but can just throw data at a box and get magic out. They’re not paying you to address the biases in the dataset or bringing social science experts or fuck just a bunch of people to look at and criticize the modeling. They’re paying you because your resume said deep learning on it and that’s a magic box you put data into and gets insights from. And it works perfectly on 90% of the devs and owners.
Photography standards suffered from the same issues up until a few decades ago.
Abstract: Until recently, due to a light-skin bias embedded in colour film stock emulsions and digital camera design, the rendering of non-Caucasian skin tones was highly deficient and required the development of compensatory practices and technology improvements to redress its shortcomings. Using the emblematic “Shirley” norm reference card as a central metaphor reflecting the changing state of race relations/aesthetics, this essay analytically traces the colour adjustment processes in the industries of visual representation and identifies some prototypical changes in the field. The author contextualizes the history of these changes using three theoretical categories: the ‘technological unconscious’ (Vaccari, 1981), ‘dysconsciousness’ (King, 2001), and an original concept of ‘cognitive equity,’ which is proposed as an intelligent strategy for creating and promoting equity by inscribing a wider dynamic range of skin tones into image technologies, products, and emergent practices in the visual industries.
Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity
