The Good Robot Podcast, and the DAIR Institute, are bringing femme-and-diversity-power to the lads' world of AI
From The Good Robot site
There’s a politics arising around the use of AI, which it’s interesting to see women leading on, given the ridiculous disproportion of men at the core of this technology. We think these voices - often explicitly feminists and civic-oriented - are crucial to shaping its computational powers in a human-friendly direction. We list some below:
The DAIR Institute
This has been founded by Timnit Gebru, a Google employee whose paper criticising the AI “language models” used by the company led to her dismissal (ie, programs that sharpen their performance from constantly processing texts fed into it).
As Wikipedia reports, Gebru’s paper criticised “their environmental and financial costs of these model, their inscrutability leading to unknown dangerous biases, the inability of the models to understand the concepts underlying what they learn, and the potential for using them to deceive people”.
As the DAIR (standing for Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research) Institute says on its About page:
We are an interdisciplinary and globally distributed AI research institute rooted in the belief that AI is not inevitable, its harms are preventable, and when its production and deployment include diverse perspectives and deliberate processes it can be beneficial. Our research reflects our lived experiences and centers our communities.
…Proactive, pragmatic research: We believe that artificial intelligence can be a productive, inclusive technology that benefits our communities, rather than work against them. However, we also believe that AI is not always the solution and should not be treated as an inevitability. Our goal is to be proactive about this technology and identify ways to use it to people’s benefit where possible, caution against potential harms and block it when it creates more harm than good.
An example of their research is a recommendation that “every dataset be accompanied with a datasheet that documents its motivation, composition, collection process, recommended uses, and so on”.
The Good Robot
From The Good Robot site
This week we also found this excellent podcast, The Good Robot, which appears to be a project from Cambridge Uni. Here’s their blurb:
TECH NEEDS A FEMINIST DO-OVER: Join University of Cambridge and Christina Gaw postdoctoral researchers Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth as they ask the experts: what is good technology? Is ‘good’ technology even possible? And what does feminism have to say about it?
Each week, they invite scholars, industry practitioners, activists, and more to provide their unique perspective on what feminism can bring to the tech industry and the way that we think about technology. With each conversation, The Good Robot asks how feminism can provide new perspectives on technology’s biggest problems.
From 2021, the Good Robot team (comprising Christina Gaw, Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth) have steadily amassed what amounts to an alternative, progressive and decolonised research base for artificial intelligence - see this amazing archive, on topics like AI colonialism, large language models and misogyny, AI and disability, and much more. (There are other tech issues considered, but AI is the main focus).
They have a very useful transcripts and reading lists page. And they’re also pretty adroit at using social media - see this TikTok-on-Twitter post below: