Reading I NEED HELP ON MY HOMEWORK

The male gaze decides which subjects are desirable and worthy of attention, and it determines how they are to be judged. You may also be familiar with the white gaze, which similarly privileges the representation and stories of white Europeans and their descendants.

“ An unseen force is rising … that I call the coded gaze. It is spreading like a virus .”

Inspired by these terms, the coded gaze describes the ways in which the priorities, preferences, and prejudices of those who have the power to shape technology can propagate harm, such as discrimination and erasure. We can encode prejudice into technology even if it is not intentional.

The coded gaze does not have to be explicit to do the job of oppression.

Algorithmic bias occurs when one group is better served than another by an AI system. If you are denied employment because an AI system screened out candidates that attended women’s colleges, you have experienced algorithmic bias.

“In my work, I use the coded gaze term as a reminder that the machines we build reflect the priorities, preferences, and even prejudices of those who have the power to shape technology.”

Like systemic forms of oppression, including patriarchy and white supremacy, it is programmed into the fabric of society. Without intervention, those who have held power in the past continue to pass that power to those who are most like them. This does not have to be intentional to have a negative impact.

In the years since I first encountered the coded gaze, the promise of AI has only become grander.

“It will overcome human limitations, AI developers tell us, and generate great wealth.”

While AI research and development has been going on for decades, in the year 2023 it seemed the whole world was suddenly talking about AI with fear and fascination.

Generative AI products are only one manifestation of AI.

Predictive AI systems are already used to determine:

1. who gets a mortgage,

2. who gets hired, who gets admitted to college, and

3. who gets medical treatment — but products like ChatGPT have brought AI to new levels of public engagement and awareness.

AI? Can we make room for the best of what AI has to offer while also resisting its perils?

In a world where decisions about our lives are increasingly informed by algorithmic decision - making, we cannot have racial justice if we adopt technical tools for the criminal legal system that only further incarcerate communities of color.

We cannot have gender equality if we employ AI tools that use historic hiring data that reflect sexist practices to inform future candidate selections that disadvantage women and gender minorities.

We cannot say we are advocating for disability rights and create AI - powered tools that erase the existence of people who are differently abled by adopting ableist design patterns.

We cannot claim to respect privacy rights and then have our school systems adopt AI - powered surveillance systems, or capialist surveillance systems that reduce children to data to be sorted, tracked…

If the AI systems we create to power key aspects of society — from education to healthcare, from employment to housing — mask discrimination and systematize harmful bias, we entrench algorithmic injustice.

We swap fallible human gatekeepers for machines that are also flawed but assumed to be objective.

And…

…when machines fail, the people who often have the least resources and most limited access to power structures are those who have to experience the worst outcomes.

Power

AI will not solve poverty, because the conditions that lead to societies that pursue profit over people are not technical.

AI will not solve discrimination, because the cultural patterns that say one group of people is better than another because of their gender, their skin color, the way they speak, their height, or their wealth are not technical.

AI will not solve climate change, because the political and economic choices that exploit the earth’s resources are not technical.

As Dr . Rumman Chowdhury reminds us in her work on AI accountability, the moral outsourcing of hard decisions to machines does not solve the underlying social dilemmas.

In the early twentieth century, civic organizations used the phrase “ justice league ” in their fight for women’s suffrage ( “ The Equal Justice League of Young Women ” [ 1911 ] ),

Racial equality and civil rights for African Americans ( “ Race Justice League ” [ 1923 ] ), and

Workers ’ rights ( “ Justice League” [ 1914 ] ).

Scores of justice - oriented organizations continue to tap into this tradition today.

Real - world justice leagues serve as inspiration for the belief that against tyranny, oppression, and erasure, we can choose to resist and offer pathways to liberation.

I positioned the emerging work I was doing with the Algorithmic Justice League to follow this banner.

Machines were presumed to be free from the societal biases that plague us mortals. My experiences were showing me otherwise.

Unless we know where the data comes from, who collected it, and how it is organized, we cannot know if ethical processes were used.

There can be billions of parameters in the systems used to build generative AI products that can create images from a line of text such as “an astronaut riding a horse in space.” LLMs can have trillions of parameters.

Simply because decisions are made by a computer analyzing data does not make them neutral. Neural does not equate to neutral.

…if an automated decision impacts your opportunities and liberties, you must have a voice and a choice in whether and how technology is used.

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