Black women, AI, and overcoming historical patterns of abuse

The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. After a 2019 research paper demonstrated that commercially available facial analysis tools fail to work for women with dark skin, AWS executives went on the attack. Instead of offering up more equitable performance results or allowing the federal government to assess their algorithm like other companies with facial recognition tech have done, AWS executives attempted to discredit study coauthors Joy Buolamwini and Deb Raji in multiple blog posts. More than 70 respected AI researchers rebuked this attack, defended the study, and called on Amazon to stop selling the technology to police, a position the company temporarily adopted last year after the death of George Floyd. But according to the Abuse and Misogynoir Playbook, published earlier this year by a trio of MIT researchers, Amazon's attempt to smear two Black women AI researchers and discredit their work follows a set of tactics that have been used against Black women for centuries.