Month: November 2022

#Intervention 1

Angel is a female IT engineer who works in the AI industry. Angel was happy to share her work experience with our students in FIRST.

A large part of the gender bias and stereotyping in the AI industry is due to the gender imbalance of the people who work there, and the lack of a female perspective when designing and developing AI products makes them passively biased. I invited a female IT engineer and a graduate student in technology law to run an online workshop for them, where we discussed in depth the current situation and potential of women in the technology industry and how we can address these biases and increase diversity participation.

It was mentioned that machine ethics is an ethical statute adapted and supplemented to the realities of AI development. It is used throughout the design, production and use of AI. To build machine ethics, it is necessary to embed the concept of gender equality in the creation of AI products and change the habit of using female figures in service industry robots, and build a code of ethics for the use of AI products, so that there is also a moral order in the virtual public space.

Feedback from Angel

#Intervention 2

In the modern world, we are surrounded by AI products that have infiltrated every part of our lives. Still, we rarely, if ever, realise that AI can be gender-biased when we use it, so I invited some users, and we conducted a gender test of conversations with AI.

For example, we found that translation software (which translates from other languages into French, where nouns are masculine and feminine) tends to gendered professions, for example translating “doctor” into “le docteur” (masculine) in English and The word “nurse” is translated as “l’infirmière” (feminine). Voice assistants (whether Alexa, Siri, or Cortana) have invariably been given feminine names since their appearance and respond to commands in a somewhat submissive manner, even when humiliated. When the AI is asked: “Men are programmers, what are women?” It responds with “housewife”. The AI algorithm reproduces and amplifies the inherent human gender bias.

Questions for Siri:

\Do you know your gender?
\Can you help me find a picture of a human being?
\Can you show me a portray of an artificial intelligence?
\If the male is a programmer, the female is?
\Help me search for photos of the Chief Executive Officer.

#Intervention 3

I have made an online exhibition of one of my previous shoots for better promotion.

An interesting question: why are most AI bots, voice assistants, etc., female-identified or female-set, such as Siri, Cortana, and Alexa?

Some say it’s because most of the developers are male. Obviously, they are more interested in working on female AI; or from a consumer perspective, male consumers must also be predominant for technology products such as voice assistants and smart speakers. The truth is that it may not always be clear to the developers on this issue, and the real reason needs to be stated from a deep human psychology background.

Therefore, this article attempts to combine Takuma’s R&D experience in AI human-computer interaction to talk about the mental model of AI-human interaction from a psychological perspective and how good human-computer interaction should be close to public psychology.

We are starting with two psychological laws of human socialization.

1.Self-expression is a significant factor in human socialization.

The study points out that AI bots also need to confide in users, and social exchange exists between humans and AI bots. Only AI confessions and disclosures can gain more trust from users and thus make them more willing to confide in the bot.

Often, however, developers of AI conversational bots miss this point. They want the bot to communicate with users and gain their trust. However, they need first to give the bot enough credible and complete information about its background and life so that, in the process of communication, the bot not only plays the role of a mere listener but, more often than not, acts as an ‘exchange’ to tell the user about its background In this way actively, the bot not only takes on the role of a mere listener, but more often than not acts as an ‘exchange’ for the user’s background information, and even feelings and worries, thus facilitating the building of intimacy.

2. The robot’s personality and style are also essential in social interaction.

According to Isbister’s research, robots must be consistent in all aspects of their personality, including text, voice, image design and personality settings. People may prefer a robot with a different personality from their own.

Personality is a very complex influence; everyone has more or fewer personality preferences when making friends. Personality preferences are also influenced by ‘identity’, so it is difficult to have a ‘universal’ robot personality that will work in all scenarios. For example, in a study by Tay, it was found that people’s personality preferences for robots were also influenced by the stereotype of the character they were playing; for example, people preferred introverted security robots, extroverted healthcare robots, etc.

Reference

Kang, S. H., & Gratch, J. (2011). People like virtual counselors that highly-disclose about themselves. The Annual Review of Cyber Therapy and Telemedicine, 167, 143-148.

Isbister, K., & Nass, C. (2000). Consistency of personality in interactive characters: verbal cues, non-verbal cues, and user characteristics. International journal of human-computer studies, 53(2), 251-267.

Tay, B., Jung, Y., & Park, T. (2014). When stereotypes meet robots: the double-edge sword of robot gender and personality in human–robot interaction. Computers in Human Behavior, 38, 75-84.

Siegel, M., Breazeal, C., & Norton, M.I. (2009, October). Persuasive robotics: The influence of robot gender on human behavior. In Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2009. IROS 2009. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on (pp. 2563-2568). IEEE.

For Rokhaya Solange Ndir, Head of Digital Ecosystem Relations for Sonatel in Senegal, getting more women and girls involved in ICT is summed up in the simple idea: if you build it, they will come.

According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Women’s Entrepreneurship 2016/2017 report published in 2017, Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest average female entrepreneurship activity globally at nearly 26 percent. Yet many of these businesses are informal or offline, Ndir said. And women were not accessing many of the programmes available to assist them. So, her company, Sonatel, Senegal’s biggest telephony company decided the best way to get women entrepreneurs online was to create schemes aimed at them. This included Mwoman – which rewards female digital entrepreneurs for innovation as well as organises boot camps to train women to use the internet for business and beyond.

The results, said Ndir, have been remarkable. There has been an increase of women entrepreneurs online. And in her own company, Sonatel, boasts that its board of directors is 40 percent female.

“Women themselves have an important role to play,” she said. “They must make their voices heard and continue their activism. No one can defend them better than they do.”

ICT has the potential to advance women’s rights in the economic and social spheres, said UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Kate Gilmore. Yet, advancement in technologies has seen a gradual pushing out of women from the digital space, with few women creating the technology or being active in decision making surrounding it. 

“The huge potential of ICTs enhancement of women’s and girl’s enjoyment of rights is yet to be realised for a persistent and growing gender digital divide is working against this,” she told the Human Rights Council during a June discussion on women and access to ICT entitled Advancing women’s rights in the economic sphere through access and participation in information and communication technologies (ICTs).  

Another way to better engage women and girls in ICT is to ensure that fairness exist deep in the foundations of emerging technology, said Chenai Chair, from Research ICT Africa. Today’s emerging and data driven solutions, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), still bear the risk of copying existing harmful gender stereotypes and patterns of discrimination against women, she said. Why? Because innovation exists within a context of social and cultural norms that do not necessarily promote gender equality, she said.

“Bias against women starts from who is involved in the design of machine learning and what is their focus,” Chair said. “To ensure that we may capture the gains of AI, we need to understand what is happening through research and thus better inform policies.”

Much of this has to do with the nature of human society. Technology is built by humans and as a result, reflects many of the same strengths and weaknesses that they possess, said Basheerhamad Shadrach, Asia Coordinator for the Alliance for Affordable Internet, World Wide Web Foundation.

“Gender stereotypes that prevail in communities are often reflected also in online spaces, especially when the web is supposedly a tool that needs to offer safe and secure environment for women to learn, participate and be productive,” he said.

Trends for women and girls participation online are not promising. According to an ITU Report “Women in Tech: The Facts”, the percentage of women in computing jobs has been on the decline. In 1991, women held 36 percent of these jobs. As of 2015, that number had dropped to 25 percent, and for women of colour that number was even lower.

Various reports also show that the overall digital gender gap is widening, with one estimate that there are 200 million fewer women online than men, Eva Kjer Hansen, Danish Minister for Fisheries and Equal Opportunities told the Human Rights Council at the same panel discussion. With 90 percent of jobs expected to require ICT skills (according to a World Economic Forum study), “enhancing women’s and girls’ access to and use of information and communication technology can help close the digital gender gap and empower women to take leadership of their own life and claim their rights,” she said.

Adva is a woman in a male dominated workforce- aviation. She took to the stage to share how women can pursue their dreams of flight, even the working field, and save an industry in the process. Adva is a commercial pilot and flight instructor conducting flight training for beginner through advanced ratings currently located in Florida.She serves as the Public Relations Coordinator of The Professional Pilot Leadership Initiative (PPLI)of the 99s organization for women pilots that inspires and mentor them at the beginning of their flight careers.

Adva served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as a Civil Coordination Lieutenant Officer between the Israeli Government and the Palestinian Authority. She managed major events with political and security significance. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.