The AI Bias Before Christmas
Explain AI bias like you're five? How about with Santa?
A parody of the "The Night Before Christmas" poem ("A Visit from St. Nicholas" by Clement Clarke Moore) where Santa's elves decide to use machine learning to automate the naughty/nice list and discover an important lesson about historical data and AI bias.
For a text-only version of this poem: / twas-the-ai-bias-before-christmas
This academic year my public education work is supported by the Notre Dame IBM Tech Ethics Lab (https://techethicslab.nd.edu/). For (a lot!) more of me talking about issues in tech and AI ethics, check out my TikTok and Instagram @professorcasey.
The end of the video also includes a (very very brief!) discussion of AI bias. Here are some additional resources cited in the video:
"Coded Bias" documentary (2020) directed by Shalini Kantayya, currently available on Netflix
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble (2018)
More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech by Meredith Broussard (2023)
Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks (2018)
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruja Benjamin (2019)
Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini (2023)
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil (2016)
"The next normal: Algorithms will take over college, from admissions to advising" by Shea Swauger (The Washington Post, 11/12/21)
"A biased medical algorithm favored white people for health-care programs" by Charlotte Jee (MIT Technology Review, 10/25/19)
Image Credit: OpenAI's DALL-E 3 via ChatGPT-4, and countless uncompensated and uncredited artists whose work contributed to the model.