Understanding
How AI could perpetuate racism, sexism and other biases in society
by Brianna Scott, Jeanette Woods, Ailsa Chang| JULY 19, 2023
Excerpt from the article…
“N PR’s Ailsa Chang speaks with scholar Safiya Noble about how advancements in artificial intelligence could further perpetuate biases in society.
CHANG: Give us some specific ways that biased AI is affecting people’s lives right now.
NOBLE: Well, one of the things we know, probably – and I will start with what I think of as the most life or death dimensions of AI — biased AI, discriminatory AI — would be the use of AI in things like criminal sentencing and, you know, determining whether a person is likely to be a risk or not and keeping them in prison or in jail or releasing them on bail or releasing them entirely.
CHANG: And why is that? What kind of information is being fed into AI to determine these sentences that would be inherently biased against Black people?NOBLE: What is used to determine these kinds of predictive AIs are things like histories of arrests in a certain zip code. So if you live in a zip code that has been overpoliced historically, you are going to have over-arresting. And we know that the overpolicing and the overarresting happens in Black and Latino communities. That’s just a fact. So if that is a main factor in whether you are likely to commit — in predicting whether you’re likely to commit another crime because lots of people in the zip code you live in have been arrested more than, let’s say, you know, in South Central LA where I live versus in Beverly Hills, then you are more likely to be considered a risk. That has nothing to do with you. That has to do with the history of structural racism in policing in the United States.
TAGS: [2010’s] [-ing While Black] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [Justice System] [Prison System]