AI is nearly exclusively designed by men – here’s how to fix it

It’s the second day of Women and the future of science conference at the Royal Society in London, but I’m finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the speakers because my AI transcription software – which is supposed to make my life easier – insists on making typos in someone’s name. For every mention of a Julie, he types Julian. The irony is not lost on me: this is a session about artificial intelligence, and specifically how women are erased from the latest AI technologies.

This is much bigger than the now-familiar idea that AI algorithms carry biases from the datasets they are trained on, including gender biases.

Instead, the aim of the conference, chaired by computer scientist Wendy Hall, seeks to address a more fundamental issue: the fact that new AI technologies, which will have a transformative effect on all of society, are being designed almost exclusively by men.

Technology has always been a male-dominated industry. In the UK, only 25 percent of computer science students are women. But in recent years – and as generative AI has flourished – Silicon Valley has become increasingly hostile to women.

“Over the last couple of years there has been a regression,” says David Leslie, head of ethics and responsible innovation research at the Alan Turing Institute. “The question of whether the Trump administration has caused intergenerational harm to women in science is indisputable. We live in an age of retrospective reflection.”

Last year, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order targeting so-called woke AI and recommended that the US National Institute of Standards and Technology revise its AI risk management framework to “eliminate references to misinformation, diversity, equity and inclusion, and climate change.”

One of the speakers, Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist and former US science envoy for artificial intelligence, was head of ethics and accountability at Twitter before Elon Musk took over and fired his team. She points out that the concept of woke AI grew out of misogynistic attitudes within Silicon Valley before Trump’s order.

Asked by Hall to describe AI without women, several panelists say we’re already there. “I’m in the world of frontier AI, and it’s the world of AI without the women,” Chowdhury says. It’s a sentiment shared by Rachel Coldicutt, who studies the social impacts of new and emerging technologies. “If we think about what the world would look like without women in AI, I think that’s what we have right now. It’s not a fantasy at all.”

It goes without saying: it matters. There is a long history of technologies developed for human bodies and needs, from crash test dummies to office air conditioning to astronauts’ spacesuits to the vast majority of medical research. This is called the gender data gap, and the consequences can range from embarrassing to life-threatening.

AI will impact everything from the jobs we do to how we educate our children and what diseases we can treat. But currently, only 2 percent of venture capital funding goes to women, Chowdhury points out. Meanwhile, less than 1 percent of health care research and innovation is dedicated to women’s health. “We need to make technology work for 8 billion people, not eight billionaires,” says Coldicutt.

What should be done? With hundreds of years of biased data built into today’s AI models, Coldicutt doesn’t believe it will be possible to correct it. “We need alternative models,” she says. It is also an opportunity to reorient the action of these models. “It’s about cultivating models…that prioritize care for people and the planet.” »

Chowdhury, who co-founded a nonprofit called Humane Intelligence that helps companies make AI systems more accountable and equitable, thinks part of the problem is that many of the current developments in AI are built around a false sense of urgency, emphasizing the existential risk that AI poses to jobs or even humanity. If word comes that your house is on fire, “you don’t wonder, ‘What happened to my mother’s jewelry?’ “, she said. If people feel like they don’t have time, they give up on anything that seems superfluous, including diversity, she says.

As for the next generation, we need to address the economic and policy framework in which AI is developed if we want to encourage young people to develop AI for social good, says Leslie: “We need to start with the basics, start with transforming the incentives. »

Ultimately, we may also need to rethink our very definition of intelligence in the context of AI to include broader and more diverse ways of thinking. Much of the original thinking about AI, including how to define it, originated at an influential meeting in the 1950s at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. “This definition of intelligence came from the Dartmouth conference,” Hall explains. “Which, by the way, was all men.”