AI has a racism and sexism problem
3 min read
World leaders will convene in the United Kingdom in November to debate the frontiers of emerging tech and artificial intelligence (AI), but the threats are not in the future, they are present today.
Conversations about the future of AI must consider how unbridled AI expansion exacerbates pressing, interlocking issues surrounding environmental catastrophe, global inequality, and uneven resource distribution. Importantly, these discussions must include how companies will be held accountable for AI discrimination and oppression that stems from irresponsible business practices.
“Frontier” metaphors harken to colonial expansion and evoke an immediate border separating the present day from the promised, fantastical future. It demands an unhindered expansion for the powerful at the expense of the subjugated.
We need people- and planet-saving AI regulation
The frontier AI imaginary suggests there is an empty, unknown future demanding discovery, unencumbered and inevitable. It is a future that venture capitalists and industry leaders imagine as hindered only by experts and Luddites who fear change, rather than one fuelled by worker exploitation, environmental degradation, and manipulated financial markets free from responsible regulation and restraint.
It is a future the tech industry believes it alone can solve; it can’t.
Unfortunately, we know that every expansion of the frontier has decimated existing inhabitants –those who have lived in and cultivated those places for generations – with devastating consequences for those who have resisted.
In the AI arms race, both “frontier AI” and banal, everyday technologies such as social media, search engines, large language models, messaging apps and machine learning endeavours are fraught with biases that reinforce racism, sexism and xenophobia: from biased data sets and training models to the weaponisation of networked hate campaigns, and fraudulent AI-generated images and news.
Tech companies are complicit in extreme misinformation, voter disenfranchisement, violating civil and human rights, amplifying calls for ethnic cleansing, expanding surveillance with discriminatory facial recognition systems, bolstering anti-democratic propaganda in politics, loss of agency and privacy, and misidentification and harassment.
It is time for global leaders to engage with these hard truths.
The conversation about AI’s impact on the world is incomplete. As currently framed, it sequesters tech industries from the bigger picture of harm. Meta, X, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are well-documented breeding grounds for dangerous and harmful AI content, and they create energy-intensive supply chains that threaten the most vulnerable populations globally.
We must understand the complexity of the tech crimes we are witnessing, rather than be seduced by the industry’s hubris and fictions. Tech’s sci-fi fantasies come at great cost; their race to space is predicated on the very decimation of our planet and its resources that they themselves have wrought.
Politicians must stand up for the billions of people who will be victim to the whims of unscientific and negligent corporate behaviour. They cannot stand by and sanction products that discriminate, harm and drain precious human, financial and environmental resources.
We need people- and planet-saving AI regulation. It will be insufficient to think about the future if the current systems fail us in every direction.
The AI arms race and cybersecurity have little relevance if military systems, power grids, electronic borders and financial markets become inconsequential in the face of climate change – an industry-made crisis that is crushing those with the least power to stop it, often communities of colour and the world’s most impoverished people.
We need courageous, moral leaders who will meet this critical moment and hold Big Tech accountable for the harmful products they make. We must enact policies that keep power in check.
We have the capacity and expertise to create a world of hopeful possibilities, we only lack the character needed to do so.
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