Professor Meredith Broussard, author of “More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech” spoke to the Gilman community at CIE Night on Thursday, March 7. Her talk concentrated on the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and racism.

Broussard explained how generative AI — tools like ChatGPT — are trained on data sets. One of the biggest ones is called the Common Crawl, which is a repository of hundreds of billions of pages of web data. “Something interesting about computer scientists is they’re not really sure why machine learning works so well. They just know that the more data you put in, the better your results are,” Broussard said. “But it’s all deeply unpredictable because there are still many parameters that the human brain can’t really wrap itself around.” Journalists from the Washington Post researched this process, and, as it turns out, “there is a lot of white supremacist content … a lot of hate speech” out there on the internet. For example, all of Reddit, which has a lot of helpful information but also a lot of problematic content, is included in the crawl, and is therefore included in the generative content that AI outputs.

She provided many more cases of how AI can discriminate against people of color, women, and people with disabilities. Facial recognition technology used in policing is notorious for being able to much more effectively recognize men with lighter skin versus women with darker skin, for example. When AI is used in the hiring process, “automated résumé analysis systems have problematic assumptions built in.”

Broussard illustrated how discrimination shows up in basically every realm where AI is used, including medicine, finance, social services, politics, and others. As far as a solution goes, there’s no easy fix, according to Broussard, but the answer isn’t to give up on AI completely. Likewise, people shouldn’t solely rely on machine learning to do everything either. “The best situation is humans assisted by machines.”

She made the case that digital infrastructure needs to be funded to be maintained on a regular basis to keep people safe, just like physical infrastructure. She introduced the audience to a new field that can serve this purpose — public interest technology — which focuses on making technology that serves the public interest.

Learn more about Meredith Broussard

Buy “More Than a Glitch”

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