Colorism plays a role in the treatment of people all around the world. It is the concept that light-skinned people are treated with a higher regard than their darker-skinned companions.
This idea dates back to slavery, when lighter skinned slaves were treated better than those with darker skin. Lighter-skinned slaves were "house slaves" and they were treated with better living and working conditions. The darker skinned, or "field" slaves had the worst living and working conditions, and were punished more severely.
This created the idea that lighter skin was better skin, thus the principle of colorism. Colorism divided the black community through practices like the paper bag test and the blue vein test. In the blue vein test, you were deemed worthy if your skin was light enough to see the blue veins underneath. If you were the color of a paper bag or lighter, you passed the paper bag test.
Colorism in AI can affect the way a product works for people of color. For example, if an automatic product dispenser does not recognize the pigment in dark skin, then they do not get the opportunity to take advantage of the product. Or if facial recognition security is unable to distinguish between asian features, it could result in concerning security breaches.
Although colorism does not directly affect a white person, white people, as the model figure, could recognize and acknowledge the problem that people of color face, and use their standing to fight for and work towards making AI more inclusive.
There is a lot of representation lacking in technological fields. In addition to the lack of women in tech, there is also a serious lack of minorities in tech. So,ensuring that different races have representation when projects are being developed is important in ensuring that no one is left out of the final product.
In addition, your race shouldn’t matter when you apply for a job as long as you have the skills. People are often judged because of the color of their skin before they even get the opportunity to start talking. We are all equal. Instead of judging people, get to know them and try to work together. Issues like this are usually overlooked and never dealt with. Hopefully, our project can bring awareness to this issue and people can start working towards a more inclusive world.
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, also known as machine learning, is the ability of a machine to think, learn, and imitate intelligent human behavior. Some popular examples of AI are Siri and Alexa.
Now, bias in artificial intelligence (we will refer to it as AI bias), typically results from unintentional bias on the part of a programmer. They often do not consider types of people who are different than themselves when they are creating a product.
For example, facial recognition software often has a harder time picking up faces with darker skin tones. This is probably because there was a lack of colored people in the images that were used to teach the software what a face is. This is a problem because products that are supposed to make life easy and fun are not working well for a good percentage of the population.
The Algorithmic Justice League is an organisation that looks to challenge bias in decision making software. You can learn more about it here.