“AI-Powered Clips Portraying Black Women as ‘Bigfoot’ Elicit Laughs, Go Viral”
“AI Videos of Black Women Depicted as ‘Bigfoot’ Are Going Viral”
“FaceApp’s recent viral spread underscored the depths to which AI is embedded in our lives—occasionally to eerie effect. But Hold the Phone Lady is just the latest example of a longstanding and pernicious issue that’s well-known to researchers: the racial bias of AI systems.” This portrayal of an entrenched issue within AI systems becomes the crux of the discussion unraveling in the spectrum of tech.
Despite the chalkboard scribbles articulating the marvels of Artificial Intelligence, there’s a bitter aftertaste that still lingers – racial bias. Not to mention, it isn’t exactly a new off-note on the AI scale. Hold the Phone Lady serves to underscore the underbelly of this tech marvel – a perpetuating cycle where algorithms stereotype and prune out the diversity, molding themselves into unsavory, bias-enhancing mirror reflections of societal downsides.
Think of that AI adorning cute glasses perched atop their pixelated noses, supposedly “learning” from the real world. Adorably naive as it sounds, the reality is more of a misfired gun than a gentle, curiosity-driven exploration. The trail of these AI gun-powder reeks of racial bias, particularly against Black women, mimicking the sordid history of human bias and discrimination.
High on its computing prowess, AI algorithms can trot about, patting themselves on the back for labeling images with astounding accuracy – or so they believe. Imagine their cocktail of surprise and programmed exasperation when they stumble upon instances where they label Black women as primates (Geez…it’s 2022, not 1822!). The embarrassment could put human red-faced moments to shame (if they had faces, to begin with).
Whether it’s FaceApp or your friendly AI YouTube up-loader, both curiously share a blind spot for racial bias. FaceApp, in its digital selfie obsession spree, seemed blissfully unaware of the racial implications it carried on its back, all while wrapping its users in an unsettling, eerie embrace reminiscent of ‘The Scream’ (you know, that famous painting that perfectly captures the timeless expression of existential dread).
In a society masterstroke in combating racism, it seems awfully peculiar how AI turned out to be the direct antithesis, ingraining racial bias into its code. If one wonders about AI and racial bias, they’d find narratives tainted with an unpalatable, disappointing hue of discrimination. Shouldn’t AI eradicate human flaws rather than imitate them?
Take this as food for thought while sipping morning coffee, it is clear that we need to fix this glitch. Forecasting an AI-driven future without addressing these issues is equivalent to gifting a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces (slightly annoying, pretty unsatisfying, and not what was promised on the box). Only when bias is uprooted from AI, can it become an unbiased reflection of the society it learns from – or at least that is the way it’s supposed to go down, right?