Director Shalini Kantayya exposes dangers of artificial intelligence in ‘Coded Bias’
“Coded Bias” closely follows Silkie Carlo, a senior advocacy officer at Liberty and co-author of “Information Security for Journalists,” who says that these technologies are more likely to misidentify an innocent citizen than to correctly identify the criminal. In fact, Carlo says “98 percent of those matches are in fact incorrectly matching an innocent person as a wanted person.”
“Coded Bias” captured such an event in the United Kingdom, displaying members of an out-of-uniform police force halting, searching, and fingerprinting a Black 14-year-old boy for possessing a “facial match” with a criminal. His friends from school stood by watching, helpless against the police and their inaccurate facial recognition technology.
For this reason, Carlo became the director of Big Brother Watch, a British nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting citizen privacy against state surveillance. The viewer observes Carlo campaigning for Big Brother Watch by approaching members of the U.K. Parliament on a London street corner, eager to explain how facial recognition poses an infringement upon one’s privacy.
Buolamwini scrolled through the data set of the facial recognition software, noting that since each face was white, “systems weren’t familiar with faces like mine.” Buolamwini herself described this, presenting a slide to the MIT Media Lab reading “data is destiny” and highlighting how skewed data leads to skewed artificial intelligence systems.
See the full story here: https://www.columbiaspectator.com/arts-and-entertainment/2021/03/06/director-shalini-kantayya-exposes-dangers-of-artificial-intelligence-in-coded-bias/
