Where is AI taking the world, and how is it embedded with long-held, damaging bias and prejudice? These questions are among those posed by Tracey Spicer in her new book, Man-Made, ahead of her appearance at Byron Writers Festival 2023.
Tracey Spicer is one of Australia’s best-known journalists, having made her name as a newsreader on commercial TV in the 1990s.
Spicer’s book Man-Made: How the Bias of the Past is Being Built Into the Future explores the thorny and extremely topical issue of artificial intelligence (AI), and its potential to transform humankind on an existential level, through a feminist lens – asking crucial questions of what the future may bring us as AI evolves.
How and when did the idea for this book first emerge in your mind? What were the key questions you wanted to answer at the outset?
This book was inspired by a conversation with my then eleven-year-old son, Taj. ‘Mum, I want a robot slave,” he said one morning. Taj had been watching an episode of South Park, in which Cartman was ordering around his Amazon Alexa using extremely offensive language. Suddenly, I realised that the 1950s ideal of women and girls being servile was being embedded into the technologies of the future. I wanted to discover why chatbots for the home sounded female, while those in the banking and finance sector had male voices. Ultimately, my aim was to discover who were the villains, and what we could do to reduce the bias being built into artificial intelligence.
The book’s subtitle is ‘How the bias of the past is being built into the future’. Can you give us a brief summary of how this is taking place?
It starts with the datasets, which are used to train the algorithms. All of these datasets are from the past. So, most doctors are ‘he’ and nurses are ‘she’. There is also a tendency to default to descriptions of people who are white, heteronormative and able-bodied. The bias born in the algorithm becomes a troublesome teenager through machine learning. In the book, I compare machine learning with a white supremacist going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory websites. The bots become more bigoted over time.
What issues, facts, trends or revelations surprised you the most during your research?
I was horrified by the story of the ‘racist soap dispensers’. Several years ago, a Nigerian tech worker tried to use an AI-powered soap dispenser in a Marriot hotel, but it wouldn’t work for his hand. However, it did work for his white colleague. You see, we picture Big Tech as a handful of large corporations. But most inventions are tested by tiny teams, comprising four to five people. Usually, these are young white men based in Silicon Valley. This technology did not recognise people of colour. The same tech is being used in self-driving cars. What happens when the cars can’t detect a person at a pedestrian crossing? This is a matter of life and death.
Given your status as a writer and the topic of the book, what has been your reaction to the growing prevalence of ChatGPT? How might your book’s premise relate to that platform in particular?
ChatGPT is beset with bias. If you ask it to tell a story about an engineer and a childcare worker, it will almost always make the engineer male, and the childcare worker female. This simply creates more content reinforcing the gender-segregated workforces of the past. Then, material will be ‘scraped’ from the internet to create new AIs, repeating and amplifying the bias. However, I urge everyone to use ChatGPT to train it do be better! If women and people in marginalised communities refuse to use this technology, we risk our voices being silenced.
What hopes do you have for the book in terms of how it might fit into the wider national conversation of this topic?
I am of the firm belief that we’re having the wrong conversation about artificial intelligence. The tech billionaires are calling for a moratorium on further development of this constellation of technologies, to divert attention from the real-world damage they’re causing now. The current conversation is framed around a near-to-distant future. But the bias and discrimination happening under our noses is fraying our social fabric, widening the gap between rich and poor, and deepening stereotypes and inequity.
Tracey Spicer will be appearing on both Saturday and Sunday at 2023 Byron Writers Festival in the sessions Ethics of AI with Grace Chan and Suneel Jethani; The Feminist Trajectory with Madison Godfrey and Kristine Ziwica; and Living Disgracefully with Susan Johnson and Jacinta Parson, as well as in conversation with Paul Barclay about her book Man-Made.
