Cambridge Analytica & Facial Recognition

For our last lecture of the year, Ms. Kass talked about gender bias in artificial intelligence. We talked about how your searches online impact what kind of advertisement you see, your google searches and what pops up most frequently on your social media home pages. The websites record all of the things that you do and adapt based on what you search and click. This can be used to impact shopping decisions, opinions, and elections. Cambridge Analytica is a data mining firm, that worked on Donald Trump's presidential campaign in the election of 2016. The firm had gained access to more than 50 million user profiles. Some believe that Cambridge Analytica might have used the information of users to gain an advantage in the election. This is not the first time it has happened. In the presidential election of 2012 Barack Obama’s election team used the same method to gain an advantage. But there was a big sort of scary difference. Obama’s team told voters what it was doing, Cambridge Analytica did not. Cambridge Analytica gained information in a total violation of Facebook’s rules and did not tell anyone the info was being used for political advertising.

Ms. Kass showed us a video of Joy Buolamwini talking about artificial intelligence in facial recognition. Ms. Buolamwini explained in the video how machines struggle to recognize other types of people than white males. This clearly does not reflect equality around the world. I believe that this problem can be fixed if the diversity, within the groups of people designing and coding these machines, is increased. I also believe that this is not something that is done on purpose. Since there are so many white males in the field of computer science it sort of does make sense that there are gender and race bias in facial recognition. This is just human nature, but in order to make it more equal, there simply needs to be more diversity within computer science.