Film Festival Reviews

New York Human Rights Watch Film Festival Review: “Coded Bias” Shows That Even Artificial Intelligence Can Be Racist


 

An exploration of the fallout of MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini’s startling discovery of racial bias in facial recognition algorithms.

I was not the least bit surprised to find out that artificial intelligence is biased when it comes to race and gender. The majority of people who began coding were white men and their thoughts and beliefs have transferred into the hardware of computer systems. When African American computer scientist Joy Buolamwini discovered her face could not be detected by facial recognition without wearing a white mask, she was determined to find out why. Her findings began with uncovering coding programmed to only recognize fair to white faces and went even further as her research proved algorithms automatically advanced white men compared to women and other races in areas including employment, healthcare, apartment applications, credit card approval, and college acceptance.

There are so many of our important life decisions made by computer algorithms that are not designed to advance specific individuals. As joy and others in her field fight to change this system, you can’t help but think about how many times people will be turned down just because a computer has automatically put them in the declined pile. This documentary is an eye-opener and a step closer to recognizing yet another problem we have to tackle racism and sexism. I recommend you see this documentary and talk about it with as many people as possible.

For more information on the New York Human Rights Watch Film Festival or to buy online passes, please click HERE.

 

Available to stream at the New York Human Rights Watch Film Festival Friday, June 12th

 

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Malika Harris

Malika is a Writer from NYC who loves movies and talking about them.