Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 4
Posts 1 - 4

Tech’s sexism doesn’t stay in Silicon Valley. It’s in the products you use.

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 8.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, artificial intelligence, diversity, gender, research/study
Summary | Slicon Valley has been entangled in scandals around sexism and racism recently. Many innovations incorporate artificial intelligence which means that the software learns from data reflecting our social reality but which are biased. This leads to issues like image recognition not recognizing black people as humans but as gorillas because the data the program learned from included predominantly white people. A similar case is a health app that tracked various physical paramenters but not the menstrual cycle thereby disregarding a large proportion of the female population.
Image Description | N/A

Blind Facebook users 'see' photos

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Newspaper | USA Today
Date | 5.4.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, diversity, Facebook, Instagram
Summary | Facebook has a new function that is meant to make the predominantly visual platforms of Facebook and Instagram more inclusive to people with visual impairments. The new software uses artificial intelligence to tell blind users what is in the images. It is not perfect yet but the image recognition can identify simple things like specific sports, etc.
Image Description | Screenshots of Facebook feeds with the image content captioned.
Image Tags | Facebook

Neuronales Netzwerk beschreibt Fotos für Blinde

(Neuron network describes pictures for blind people)

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Newspaper | Die Zeit
Date | 5.4.2016
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, diversity, Facebook
Summary | Facebook is testing a new function that tells blind users what is depicted by an image on Facebook. The system does not need human input to recognize the content of images - it has been feed with millions of images to "learn" to recognize certain things like the outdoors and sports. This is a way to include people with visual disabilities better on social media because a lot of the activity there is visual.
Image Description | Facebook feed with photographs explained.
Image Tags | Facebook, female(s), male(s)

Maschinen sind nicht die besseren Menschen

(Machines are the better people)

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Newspaper | Sonntagszeitung
Date | 14.5.2017
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, diversity, gender, translation
Summary | One could think that artificial intelligence robots are not racist or sexist but because they learn from information circulating on the internet, they are subject to the biases as most poeple. This is why a beauty contest judged by an AI robot favored white people as more beautiful. Online job listings can also be biased based on gender so that women will not see higher-paying job listings or gender inclusive language gets lost in translation.
Image Description | N/A

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