In this token-strewn, post-ChatGPT world, we lend great credence to The Algorithm. It determines our route to work in the morning, tells us what to watch next, manages our retirement fund, and rewrites our emails. It’s easy to take its output as optimal—unlike the imperfect human mind, The Algorithm is objective, mathematical, and logical… right?
Coded Bias, a 2020 documentary by Shalini Kantayya, explores how inequality in the modern world propagates through artificial intelligence and algorithms. It follows computer scientist Joy Buolamwini, an MIT Media Lab scholar who discovered that facial recognition systems are much worse at identifying more-melanated faces. The film investigates the many areas in which minority peoples are systematically disenfranchised by AI, including in insurance claims, job hiring, the legal system, and education. Coded Bias posits that algorithms succumb to biased data sets and the prejudices of their creators, and when implemented in an effort to streamline processes, become instruments of injustice.
Further, the documentary highlights how algorithms are used to restrict liberty, touching on issues of digital privacy, surveillance apparatuses in the UK and Hong Kong, and the corporatocracy that rules the tech industry. Though released before the emergence of generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT), Coded Bias remains relevant to the issues that still plague algorithms, and steers mostly clear of the Luddite ado that the ‘AI explosion’ brought to fruition.
You can stream Coded Bias and thousands of other documentaries for free through the library.