AI is freaking everywhere these days, whether we want it or not. Sometimes it feels like my Facebook feed is 80-90% garbage AI “art”, or people complaining about garbage AI content. And as a creative person who is friends with a lot of creative people, a lot of the conversations I get into about AI have to do with how it impacts creative fields, such as whether it’s appropriate to use AI for any part of the writing process, or drama over AI-generated images being used in book covers.
But generative AI is just one facet of this field, and there are serious, perhaps life-threatening concerns in other fields. These serious concerns are often the result of bias in data sets or algorithmic parameters. That’s the focus of Unmasking AI by Joy Buolamwini.
It all started when the author was working on a project for a class, and wanted to make a mirror that would project your hero’s face over your own. She downloaded facial mapping software, only to find that it did not recognize her face. It would recognize the face of her lighter-skinned friends and classmates — and it would recognize her face if she put on a white mask she had leftover from Halloween. This mask became a symbol in her work, and is referenced on the cover (I really find the cover of this book so striking!).
After encountering this problem several more times, Buolamwini started digging into the bias that led to darker-skinned faces not being recognized. She uncovered even more bias — algorithms designed to sort people by gender not only relied on binary ideas of gender, but often misgendered women of color. Similarly, they were bad at guessing the age of dark-skinned people. She discovered real-life ways that algorithms trained on limited data sets could harm people, such as test proctoring software that would flag disabled people as potentially cheating due to their need to moving more or differently than an able-bodied and neurotypical student might, or the potential deadly risk of self-driving cars not recognizing dark-skinned pedestrians in time to avoid striking them… And of course, the danger of a person being misidentified as a criminal suspect due to algorithms doing a poor job of differentiating between dark-skinned people.
This book is one part pop-sci and one part memoir, as Buolamwini not only explains AI and algorithms, but also talks about her personal journey through academia and activism as she attempts to educate people about the risks and convince the companies behind these algorithms to do better. Along the way, as she runs her own experiments, she has to grapple with the ethics of sourcing and labeling data sets (which brings us back to the issues with image generation, but I digress…).
I found this book very enlightening and entertaining. It didn’t so much tell me things I didn’t already know or suspect, but instead enhanced my knowledge about something I didn’t have a deep understanding about. It’s very much designed to help the layperson understand AI ethics — people who are already deep in the field probably won’t find much new here in that regard, but might still enjoy hearing about Buolamwini’s journey, and it will give them something to discuss with the people in their lives who don’t “get” what they do.
I chose the audiobook for this one, and it’s read by the author, which was great. When a story is this personal, I love hearing it in the author’s words! But I do think my long-term understanding of the subject would be enhanced if I had read it with my eyeballs instead, because then I could have more easily flipped back and forth.
CWs and TWs: This book discusses racism, colorism, sexism, ableism, and policing, mostly as institutionalized issues rather than individual instances.
Format and Source: I read this as an audiobook from Sno-Isle Libraries.
Book Bingo Prompts
Nook & Cranny (Card 2) The Future is Feminist. I thought I’d read some sort of sci-fi for this prompt, but when I heard about Unmasking AI, I knew it was a great choice. After all, in order to have a feminist future, we need forward-thinking, intersectional feminist scientists like Dr. Buolamwini today.
Book Bingo Progress
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 17 out of 25 prompts complete. 2 bingos.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 15 out of 25 prompts complete. 1 bingo.
SAL/SPL Adult Summer Reading: 11 out of 23 prompts, 0 bingos.