Black lives and AI seeing in color

Whether it’s ChatGPT, facial recognition, the latest profile picture trend on social media or the metaverse, AI (artificial intelligence) is in the news a lot.

AI is a branch of computer science in which machines are trained to perform tasks associated with human beings, whether it’s “hearing” in the case of Siri, “seeing” like the facial prompts used to unlock phones or “thinking” in the case of the growing automation industry where people are being replaced by robots. Systems perform tasks, and in the same way babies learn to walk and talk, they repeat the task millions of times.

The first sign Americans were concerned about the increasing use of AI technologies came in 2000, when activists first protested against cookies — the tools that monitor and track our activity on the internet. In 2013, the National Security Agency found that the Patriot Act had been used to wiretap millions of Americans and the surveillance state we live in today was beginning to take hold.

Today, we have tools like ChatGPT that generate conversation-like responses from identified patterns in how people respond to questions in open-source text data.

For Black people, these technologies can cause real harm. In 2020, the Detroit Police Department wrongfully arrested Robert Williams after using facial recognition to identify him. Additionally, software used to determine bails and predict “criminal behavior” used in jails and courts includes algorithms which often discriminate against Black men. In recent years, a ProPublica report found that body scanners at airports often flag Black women falsely for our hairstyles.

And technology that predicts what jobs we get, what loans we qualify for and other opportunities that can determine our future are also far too often biased against us from the performance review written with ChatGPT to not being allowed to take tests because the technology fails to recognize dark-skinned students, or faucets in public restrooms failing to turn on because they do not recognize the Black hands under them.

This is algorithmic bias — the process by which technical systems express the same biases found in real life. These seemingly cool innovations are promoted as ‘”neutral” — but we have evidence they are not.

For a healthy, prosperous future where these innovations can help and not harm us, technology must also consider racism and the intersection of sexism, ableism, classism, and homophobia.

For Black people in America and across the diaspora, we deserve a future in which tech companies are questioned and held accountable for how the design, deployment and governance of advanced technical systems impact Black consumers. We deserve a future in which we only commercialize justice-oriented tech products that respect civil and human rights and are not used for policing. Black people also must realize the promise of living in a technologically advanced society and benefit from the wealth created through innovation.

A racially-inclusive tech sector would elevate Black leaders on content moderation teams, and empower them to stop the spread of videos like the horrific murder of Tyre Nichols because of the psychological impact on social media users. A Black feminist tech sector would make sure the necessary protections were in place to avoid sexual assault in the metaverse. And a justice-centered tech sector would ensure our data is kept from third-party data brokers who can develop products that track and surveil us.

Corporations, developers and policymakers need to act with urgency to make Black voices heard in the advanced tech sector, whether discussing crypto, virtual reality or quantum computing.

Black people have fought for our civil and human rights throughout time; the virtual realm is no different. We are substantially underrepresented in the field and consistently pushed out by bias and structural racism. But let’s be clear: There is no future without Black innovation, power and agency.

It is overdue for so-called allies to do more than produce empty promises during Black History Month. We need disruption of systemic bias everywhere. We are still wondering what happened to the $50 billion corporations pledged to protect and support us. Some of this funding could indeed go toward a better, more inclusive technological future for all of us. We are all still grieving the policing of Black bodies now enhanced by AI.

When people see our humanity and when we all more deeply understand our collective responsibility and the larger assignment at play, there is no limit to the equitable innovations we can create together.

Nkonde is a leader in racial justice in tech, a UN advisor, and the founder and CEO of Emmy-winning communications firm AI for the People — an organization that works to increase public understanding about how AI, web3 and quantum computing impact Black lives.