30 | New Scientist | 15 August 2020Film
Coded Bias
Shalini Kantayya
Ongoing film festival screeningsIN HER first semester as a graduate
student at the MIT Media Lab,
Joy Buolamwini encountered a
peculiar problem. Commercial
face-recognition software, which
detected her light-skinned
classmates just fine, couldn’t “see”
her face. Until, that is, she donned
a white plastic mask in frustration.
Coded Bias is a timely, thought-
provoking documentary from
director Shalini Kantayya. It
follows Buolamwini’s journey
to uncover racial and sexist bias
in face-recognition software
and other artificial intelligence
systems. Such technology is
increasingly used to make
important decisions, but many
of the algorithms are a black box.
“I hope this will be a kind of
Inconvenient Truth of algorithmic
justice, a film that explains theBias in the machines
Computers are worse at recognising women and people of colour than white
men, and algorithmic bias doesn’t stop there, finds Vijaysree Venkatramanscience and ethics around an
issue of critical importance
to the future of humanity,”
Kantayya told New Scientist.
The documentary, which
premiered at the Sundance Film
Festival earlier this year, sees a
band of articulate scientists,
scholars and authors do most of
the talking. This cast primarily
consists of women of colour,
which is fitting because studies,
including those by Buolamwini,
reveal that face-recognition
systems have much lower
accuracy rates when identifying
female and darker-skinned faces
compared with white, male faces.
Recently, there has been a
backlash against face recognition.
IBM, Amazon and Microsoft
have all halted or restricted sales
of their technology. US cities,
notably Boston and San Francisco,
have banned government use
of face recognition, recognising
problems of racial bias.
People seem to have different
experiences with the technology.
The documentary shows aViews Culture
7 T
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DIA
tool was never used to evaluate
actual job candidates.
AI systems can also build up a
picture of people as they browse
the internet, as the documentary
investigates. They can suss out
things we don’t disclose, says
Zeynep Tufekci at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in
the film. Individuals can then be
targeted by online advertisers. For
instance, if an AI system suspects
you are a compulsive gambler, you
could be presented with discount
fares to Las Vegas, she says.
In the European Union,
the General Data Protection
Regulation goes some way to
giving people better control over
their personal data, but there is no
equivalent regulation in the US.
“Data protection is the
unfinished work of the civil rights
movement,” said Kantayya. The
film argues that society should
hold the makers of AI software
accountable. It advocates a
regulatory body to protect the
public from its harms and biases.
At the end of the film,
Buolamwini testifies in front of
the US Congress to press the case
for regulation. She wants people
to support equity, transparency
and accountability in the use of
AI that governs our lives. She has
now founded a group called the
Algorithmic Justice League, which
tries to highlight these issues.
Kantayya said she was
inspired to make Coded Bias by
Buolamwini and other brilliant
and badass mathematicians and
scientists. It is an eye-opening
account of the dangers of invasive
surveillance and bias in AI. ❚Vijaysree Venkatraman is a science
journalist in Boston, Massachusettsbemused pedestrian in London
being fined for partially covering
his face while passing a police
surveillance van. On the streets
of Hangzhou, China, we meet
a skateboarder who says she
appreciates face recognition’s
convenience as it is used to grant
her entry to train stations and
her residential complex.The film also explores how
decision-making algorithms can
be susceptible to bias. In 2014, for
example, Amazon developed an
experimental tool for screening
job applications for technology
roles. The tool, which wasn’t
designed to be sexist, discounted
résumés that mentioned women’s
colleges or groups, picking up on
the gender imbalance in résumés
submitted to the company. TheFace-recognition AI could
only “see” Joy Buolamwini
when she wore a white mask“ If an AI suspects you
are a gambler, you
could be presented
with ads for discount
fares to Las Vegas”