If fighting discrimination in AI is the next frontier in civil rights, what's the plan?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Dremale.

In 2017, MIT grad student Joy Belomwini, whose family is from Ghana, shared the challenge

of getting facial analysis software to notice her.

Hi, camera. Can you see my face? You can see her face. What about my face?

It couldn't detect her until she put on a white mask. The reason she argued, algorithmic bias.

Fighting it is one goal of the executive order on AI unveiled yesterday by the Biden administration.

Belomwini, author of the new book on masking AI, says the executive order is a step in the right

direction. This EO sets out the framework for what a standard should look like, what guidelines

should look like, but really we're going to need to look at the implementation across a number

of different agencies and offices. And so with what's been laid out, it's quite comprehensive,

which is great to see because we need a full press approach given the scope of AI.

It's not a siloed kind of conversation, or would it take a siloed set of provisions?

And how do you get that right implementation if you are the Biden administration?

I think part of it is continuing what they have been doing in terms of making sure that you have

a wide range of stakeholders involved in setting up the frameworks and the guidelines and standards.

So in the past, one thing we've had to be really careful about is corporate capture.

So if you only have the tech companies advising on what legislation should be and what regulation

should be, it's not too surprising that it would favor the company. So I think it's critical to

continue to include the voices of civil rights organizations. It's critical also to include

youth voices. And this is an area that I think could be expanded.

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