'Racist' artificial intelligence is 'painting world white'

Dr Kanta Dihal, who leads the centre's decolonising artificial intelligence initiative, said: "Given that society has, for centuries, promoted the association of intelligence with white Europeans, it is to be expected that when this culture is asked to imagine an intelligent machine, it imagines a white machine. People trust AI to make decisions. Cultural depictions foster the idea that AI is less fallible than humans. "In cases where these systems are racialised as white, that could have dangerous consequences for humans that are not." The experts looked at recent research from a range of fields, including human-computer interaction and critical race theory, to demonstrate that machines can be racialised, and that this perpetuates "real world" racial biases. This includes work on how robots are seen to have distinct racial identities, with black robots receiving more online abuse, and a study showing people feel closer to virtual agents when they perceive shared racial identity. Dr Dihal said: "One of the most common interactions with AI technology is through virtual assistants in devices such as smartphones, which talk in standard white middle-class English.