Speaker 1: You're listening to Disinformed, a mini series from There Are
Speaker 1: No Girls on the Internet. I'm Bridget Todd. I talk
Speaker 1: a lot about hostility towards underrepresented voices and technology and
Speaker 1: how it ultimately hurts us all, and facial recognition is
Speaker 1: a great example of what I mean. We know that
Speaker 1: facial recognition technology is unreliable when it comes to people
Speaker 1: with darker skin tones and women's faces, and with the
Speaker 1: rise of this technology being used for things like policing
Speaker 1: and surveillance, this is obviously a pretty big problem. We've
Speaker 1: already seen reports of black people being arrested for crimes
Speaker 1: they had nothing to do with, based solely on the
Speaker 1: use of faulty facial recognition software. This is what happens
Speaker 1: when black women are treated like outsiders in tech spaces.
Speaker 1: If the technology that plays such a big role in
Speaker 1: all of our lives is built by teams of homogeneous
Speaker 1: people with biases, they might not even realize that technology
Speaker 1: can go on to harm us all. Now, the reason
Speaker 1: that we know about the gender and racial biases encoded
Speaker 1: into facial recognition technology at all is because of the
Speaker 1: labor and talent of black women AI researchers who studied it.
Speaker 1: Joy Boulaweeny, Tim Net Gabaru, and deb Raji are black
Speaker 1: female scientists who have conducted groundbreaking research under racial and
Speaker 1: gender biases of facial recognition, software and artificial intelligence. If
Speaker 1: you've seen the documentary Coded Bias, then you've seen some
Speaker 1: of their amazing work. It's actually on Netflix right now,
Speaker 1: and I highly suggest you'll check it out. But if
Speaker 1: you watched sixty Minutes last week, you would never know
Speaker 1: that it was black women who first did this groundbreaking research.
Speaker 1: That's because even though Sixty Minutes producers reached out to Joy,
Speaker 1: who is also the head of the Algorithmic Justice League,
Speaker 1: an organization that raises awareness about the harms of AI,
Speaker 1: they just erased her voice from a story about the
Speaker 1: use of facial recognition to arrest to black people for
Speaker 1: crimes they didn't commit. Instead, they interviewed Patrick Growther, a
Speaker 1: white male computer scientist. Now, no one is saying that
Speaker 1: Growther doesn't know his stuff, but he himself correctly cites
Speaker 1: the work of these black women and acknowledges that there's
Speaker 1: with the landmark study on bias and facial recognition, and
Speaker 1: that their work was the motivation for his own work,
Speaker 1: so why didn't CBS feel the need to cite them
Speaker 1: at all? Even worse, Joyce says that CBS actually did
Speaker 1: reach after her. She says that she spoke to sixty
Speaker 1: minutes producers for hours and spent time building a custom
Speaker 1: demo for Anderson Cooper and made recommendations on research to
Speaker 1: include subjects to interview, with the emphasis on stories of
Speaker 1: black people who have been falsely arrested because of a I.
Speaker 1: She was on her way to get COVID tested for
Speaker 1: the interview when at the very last minute it was canceled.
Speaker 1: This is a ratio of black women's labor, voices, and talent,
Speaker 1: and it's even worse than it happened on a segment
Speaker 1: about racial bias. Why wouldn't CBS center the black woman
Speaker 1: who pioneered this research on a story about the way
Speaker 1: that it harms the black community. Why don't they only
Speaker 1: talk to white researchers? And it's the same thing that
Speaker 1: so many black women in tech have talked about. We
Speaker 1: aren't seen as experts even in the fields that we build.
Speaker 1: Joy is not taking us. She launched a petition demanding
Speaker 1: CBS apologized and take specific steps to make sure that
Speaker 1: black women are properly cited in the future, which just
Speaker 1: goes to show you that black women are pretty much
Speaker 1: always doing the work that makes things better for everyone.
Speaker 1: Those reporting on algorithmic biases and discrimination must prioritize the
Speaker 1: perspective of those doing the work, who are often marginalized
Speaker 1: voices themselves. This eraser is routine, this is systemic. For centuries,
Speaker 1: the labor of black women has been kept in the background,
Speaker 1: behind closed doors, and out of the public view. Black
Speaker 1: women and the brilliant, cutting, edge, field leading and sustaining
Speaker 1: work that they do must not be erased any longer.
Speaker 1: The petition reads and you can sign the petition at
Speaker 1: the link in our show description. CBS and honestly, tech
Speaker 1: in general needs to stop sidelining black women. It is
Speaker 1: Black women who consistently do the work of making tech
Speaker 1: safer and better for everyone, and we need to be
Speaker 1: recognized for it, not erased or silenced. If you've enjoyed
Speaker 1: this podcast, please help us grow by subscribing. Got a
Speaker 1: story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want
Speaker 1: to say hi. We'd love to hear from you at
Speaker 1: Hello at tango dot com. Dis Informed is brought to
Speaker 1: you by There are no girls on the Internet. It's
Speaker 1: a production of iHeart Radio and Unbust Creative Jonathan Strickland
Speaker 1: is our executive producer. Tory Harrison is our supervising producer
Speaker 1: and engineer. Michaelmato is our contributing producer. I'm your host
Speaker 1: Bridget Tod. For more great podcasts, check out the iHeart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.