My Thoughts on Coded Bias

So recently I watched this documentary called Coded Bias and it's pretty interesting to see the fallout of MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini's discovery that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces accurately, and her journey to push for the first-ever legislation in the U.S. to govern against bias in the algorithms that impact us all. "Coded Bias" effectively brings light to a modern civil rights issue that can be proven with data - the bias within facial recognition programs, particularly against those who are not like the white men who originally formed such technology. At the very beginning of the documentary, Joy found that the algorithm couldn't detect her face - until she put on a white mask. She soon discovered that most such A.I. programs are trained to identify patterns based on data sets that skew light-skinned and male. While I watched through the documentary, I recognized Timnit Gebru which she is conversing with Joy.

References:

Coded Bias Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b___vz7kZkU&t=4438s&ab_channel=GlobalDocumentary