“Coded Bias”: New Film Looks at Fight Against Racial Bias in Facial Recognition & AI Technology

A new documentary looks at the dangers of artificial intelligence and its increasing omnipresence in daily life, as new research shows that it often reflects racist biases.

Earlier this month, Cambridge, Massachusetts, became the latest major city to ban facial recognition technology, joining a growing number of cities, including San Francisco, to ban the artificial intelligence, citing flawed technology and racial and gender bias.

A recent study also found that facial recognition identified African-American and Asian faces incorrectly 10 to 100 times more than white faces. The film Coded Bias begins with Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, discovering that most facial recognition software does not recognize darker-skinned or female faces.

She goes on to uncover that artificial intelligence is not, in fact, a neutral scientific tool; instead, it internalizes and echoes the inequalities of wider society.

For more on the film, Democracy Now! speaks with Joy Buolamwini, a researcher who uses art to raise awareness on the implications of artificial intelligence and is featured in the documentary Coded Bias, which just premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Democracy Now! also speaks with Shalini Kantayya, director of Coded Bias.

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