The Artist Working to Make Artificial Intelligence Less White

It's no secret by now that artificial intelligence has a white guy problem. One could say the same of almost any industry, but the tech world is singular in rapidly shaping the future. As has been widely publicized, the unconscious biases of white developers proliferate on the internet, mapping our social structures and behaviors onto code and repeating the imbalances and injustices that exist in the real world. There was the case of black people being classified as gorillas; the computer system that rejected an Asian man's passport photo because it read his eyes as being closed; and the controversy surrounding the predictive policing algorithms that have been deployed in cities like Chicago and New Orleans, enabling police officers to pinpoint individuals it deems to be predisposed to crime--giving rise to accusations of profiling. Earlier this year, the release of Google's Arts and Culture App, which allows users to match their faces with a historical painting, produced less than nuanced results for Asians, as well as African-Americans.