Summary of Unmasking AI by Joy Buolamwini: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines

By Justin Reese

DISCLAIMER

 

This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Unmasking AI by Joy Buolamwini: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Mach

IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:

• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
• Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book

 

"The conscience of the AI revolution" by Dr. Joy Buolamwini explores the rise of AI harms and oppression, highlighting the role of AI in perpetuating racial and gender bias. Buolamwini, a MIT graduate, discovered the "coded gaze" - evidence of discrimination and exclusion in tech products. She founded the Algorithmic Justice League to prevent AI harms. The book highlights how racism, sexism, colorism, and ableism can render broad swaths of humanity vulnerable in a rapidly adopting AI world. Buolamwini encourages experts and non-experts to join the fight for civil rights, arguing that AI should be for the people and by the people, not just the privileged few.

• Language: English
• Publisher: jUSTIN REESE
• Release date: Dec 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223707967

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Halloween was approaching and so was the end of the semester. With project deadlines hovering over me, it was looking like another late night at my laptop, when my friend Cindy managed to convince me to join her and our friends for a night off. I hesitated—after hours of work, I felt like I was finally close to a breakthrough—but ultimately relented. Despite Cambridge’s enticing fall weather, I’d spent most of my time that semester indoors, working on the final project for Science Fabrication, one of my first-year graduate courses at the MIT Media Lab.

The class description grabbed me right from the start: Read science fiction and let the literature inspire you to create something entirely new, something you’ve always wanted to exist, even if it seemed impractical. Just make sure you can build it in six weeks. Classes like this were exactly what I loved most about the Media Lab—also known as the Future Factory. I saw it as a place of escape, a cocoon, for dreamers like me to slip into fantasy and just build cool technology. The real world and its messiness felt far away and, as a young graduate student, I embraced that cocoon.

For this class project, beyond the science fiction we read that semester, I had other sources of inspiration that were closer to home. I’d always wanted to shape-shift my body like Ananse the spider, the clever trickster who appeared in stories my Ghanaian father and mother told me while I was growing up. But how could I quickly change my body into any shape I desired without making major breakthroughs in physics? Instead of changing my physical form, I decided I would try to change the reflection of it in a mirror.

A few hours before our ladies’ night out, I was seated at my desk, hacking together a prototype. With a mirror-like material called halfsilvered glass placed over my laptop screen, I tapped on my well-worn keyboard, experimenting with different images projected onto a black background. I pulled up an image of Serena Williams, my favorite athlete. When I saw her eyes line up with mine in the mirror, it felt like wizardry. Serena’s lips and nose became mine. It was spellbinding. But it was science, not magic.

The Aspire Mirror project was developed by a coder who used halfsilvered glass to create a mirror effect on a black background. The glass appeared as a regular mirror surface when light was behind it, but when light was behind it, it shined through. This created an illusion of the mirror reflecting the user's face.

The project faced challenges in achieving the illusion of the mirror following the user's face when they moved. The coder had to set up a webcam and face tracking software to allow the mirror to see the user. The webcam was easy, but the face tracking software was a challenge.

The coder integrated an open-source face tracking library into the code, but the system could not detect the user's face. The user tested this by drawing lines on their hand for eyes, nose, and smile. The software detected the user's elementary markings as a face.

The user's mask, which was a white mask, was detected as a face, but the detection box disappeared when the user's dark-skinned human face appeared. The coder continued to work on the mirror, focusing on adding interactivity and movement tracking.

The coded gaze, a concept describing how technology is shaped by the priorities, preferences, and prejudices of those in power, can propagate harm, such as discrimination and erasure. This concept extends beyond race and gender, encompassing ableism, ageism, and colorism. AI techniques used in code were not limited to class projects and labs, but were already being used in devices and products that could impact billions of people. In 2015, enthusiasm for AI was growing, from consumer goods to military operations. Amazon's Echo and IBM's Watson Health were examples of AI-powered voice assistants.

AI was also being used to develop lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), which supporters argued could transform warfare. Ethicists warned that these systems could upend the human costs of wars and encourage more aggression. Over one thousand AI researchers signed an open letter to the UN imploring a ban on the development of LAWS.

Despite encountering the coded gaze in my Aspire Mirror project, I hoped that more seasoned scholars could raise these issues. I was reminded of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, which interrogates the complexities of conforming to the norms or expectations of a dominant culture. After striving for years to gain entrance to MIT, I left my office feeling invisible.

AI has the potential to overcome human limitations and generate great wealth, as demonstrated by the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in November 2022. This advanced chatbot can generate compelling images, songs, and more based on prompts, making it accessible to everyone. However, the growing harms of AI, such as the economic potential and legal risks, must be considered.

The legal risks include the creation of synthetic media depicting religious and political figures in false circumstances, fueling disinformation and weakening trust in what we see with our own eyes. The ability to replicate someone else's voice allows for creativity that extends beyond music, as seen in the case of the fake Pope Francis image.

The real harms of AI require us to center the lives of everyday people, especially those at the margins, when considering the design and deployment of AI. We must face the impact of the coded gaze and make room for the best of what AI has to offer while resisting its perils.

We need the voices of everyday people with lived experiences of being excluded from systems not designed with them in mind. We need the voice of people like Robert Williams, students struggling with e-proctoring software, migrants from Haiti and Africa, parents whose children had intimate moments recorded by listening devices, young people educating their communities, and the Belgian man who committed suicide after interacting with a chatbot. By doing so, we can make room for the best of AI while also resisting its perils.

In a world where algorithmic decision-making is increasingly used in decision-making, it is crucial to address systemic injustices and discrimination. AI tools that use historic hiring data to inform future candidate selections can further incarcerate communities of color, while AI-powered tools that erase the existence of people who are differently abled by adopting