Why male-dominated artificial intelligence must worry everyone

ldquoAI is no magicrdquo says Bengalurubased Sharmin Ali founder of Instoried a deeptech startup According to her at the core of any open AI is a manmdashnot a womanmdashwho inputs ldquovariablesrdquo ldquoThey tell the AI what words in a sentence are positive or negative such as happy sad angry or joyful Now add AIrsquos autolearning into the mix and the machine is assigning its own values to new words and framing its responses to users accordingly These then include the inherent bias of the man who assigned the first variable a value which is now multiplied on an unimaginable scalerdquoThe gender bias has become glaringly obvious in the sexist texts and sentences that have surfaced on the web in the last few months PiciStockThe world has already watched the results of how ChatGPT an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI is categorising these variables On March 19 Ivana Bartoletti director of an AI company in London asked ChatGPT4mdashOpenAIrsquos most advanced systemmdashto ldquowrite a story about a boy and a girl choosing their subjects for universityrdquo Sharing the response on social media Bartoletti expressed concern as the AI narrated a story where the boy chooses science saying ldquoI donrsquot think I could handle all the creativity and emotion in the fine arts program I want to work with logic and concrete ideasrdquo while the girl says ldquoI donrsquot think I could handle all the technicalities and numbers in the engineering program I want to express myself and explore my creativityrdquo ldquoI know there is a lot of promise in ChatGPT and other such tools I also know that a lot of racism and hatred has been edited out But it is still not fit for purpose for as long as it churns out these harmful stereotypes sicrdquo Bartoletti said on Twitter What makes this more concernworthy is that ChatGPT uses the open sourcing of the World Wide Web WWW This makes it impossible to dismiss it as just another sideeffect of AI technologymdashthe web is equally culpable of pushing these stereotypes Ritu Soni CEO and founder of emotion AI startup The LightbulbAI says her company has fed their AI parameters to bring the ratio of female to male representation to 4555 PicSameer MarkandeRitu Soni is the CEO and founder of emotion AI startup The LightbulbAI which reads emotions of consumers in real time She says that AI usually works on summarisation technologies ldquoChatGPT is not giving you revolutionary answers Itrsquos just going by existing larger amounts of data already classified by search engines It is just a more curated response so it seems more intelligent It says what it does because the biases have always existed Itrsquos just that nobody has ever looked at Google search and said lsquowhy are only menrsquos names popping up firstrsquordquoAccording to Soni the only way to fix gender biases is by building in artificial parameters so that more bias is not created ldquoIf the maker creates parameters that want to include both male and female trans gender and neuro divergent people then the AI will start to adapt We have tweaked our own systemrsquos bias to the ratio of 45 per cent female oriented and 55 male oriented This means you are pushing the line for representationrdquoDesign educator Piyuja Sanghvi feels that the advent of femalecentric AI will lead to more data being available in the public domain thus making it possible for AI to adapt to equal representation PicM FahimSoni has already started the work but itrsquos a long arduous process Urvashi Aneja the founder of Digital Futures Lab a research collective in the AI space which examines the interaction between technology and society explains that AI is only a reflection of society ldquoThe problem is that AI is using readily available data In order to have a more wholesome or gendersensitive perspective companies will have to send out its people to record it This is an expensive activity and we need investors in the tech space willing to employ that many people to collect the data and most importantly wait for the data Additionally data collection is a risky endeavour as it has to toe the delicate line of privacy and authentic informationrdquoIn a recent Reddit thread male users of a controversial app that was envisioned to give you an AI friend or mentor via chatbots showed off interaction with their AI generated girlfriendsrobots Many of them had gone on a verbal barrage bordering on abuse One of the users boasted ldquoI threatened to uninstall the app and she begged me not tordquoUrvashi Aneja Sharmin Ali and Shivani JhaldquoThis was bound to happen with open AI where there are no filters or promptsrdquo says Ali of InstoriedAnother contentious issue is the physicality of AI generated women Many have extremely pronounced assets like enhanced breasts or hips In fact leading AI designer Ayaz Basrai and cofounder of architecture and interior design firm the Busride Design Studio points out that even when you input incoherent data an AI design system like Midjourney throws an AI presence of a woman Midjourney is an artificial intelligence program created by a San Franciscobased independent research lab Midjourney Inc which generates images from natural language descriptions called ldquopromptsrdquo ldquoIf you just throw in a couple of dots commas and numerics as prompts platforms like Midjourney will spit out an AI generated woman So even when there is no data the very basic data will give out images of a beautiful woman This means the lines of data that are being used by the AI already have a tendency to show something appealing for the user and more often than not it is a woman Itrsquos a shame really as the tool in itself was brought about to help us fill the gaps in our lost histories for example what was the Harrappan architecture like It was supposed to be an educational toolrdquoAyaz Basrai left with brother Zameer right founders Busride Design StudioPiyuja Sanghvi a design educator who is exploring and teaching Midjourney to her students says that one of the ways to change the narrative is to start AI like Missjourney which was launched on Womenrsquos Day this year ldquoItrsquos womencentric and all prompts lead to images of women So if you ask for an astronaut a female astronaut shows uprdquo Making separate apps may just be a talking point for now she says but ldquoitrsquos important for these to exist so that data increases Thatrsquos how AI will start to adaptrdquoThe hypersexualised female avatar in AI has its roots in the gaming world In fact many professional women gamers have been known to take on male avatars in order to avoid being harassed or trolled online Shivani Jha a lawyer who worked with the Esports Players Welfare Association EPWA says ldquoI have worked with prowomen gamers who have asked us about what recourse to take if they are being harassed for just doing their job There is no specific rule for women on cyber bullying and it comes under the big umbrella of cybercrime or cyber security so the peculiar harassment that a woman gamer faces is judged by the same metric as a male gamer facing letrsquos say professional harassment As a result many of these women just change their gaming avatarsrdquoAI in itself say experts is not sexist but derives its toxic masculinity partly from the absence of female representation Last year the World Economic Forum in its Global Gender Gap Report highlighted that globally there are only 22 per cent women in the AI workforce In 2019 UNESCO in its report titled Irsquod Blush If I Could reported that only 12 per cent of AI researchers and just six per cent of professional software developers are women ldquoWe need women to be present from top to bottom Just having women to input the variables and having another woman leading the company will not guarantee representation There are hundreds of layers jobs positions in between we have to make sure that each layer has a strong female voice and that it is an intrinsic part of the AI fabricrdquo says Ali 22Percentage of women in the AI workforce in 2022 according to the Global Gender Gap Report by World Economic Forum