New year, same Bullshit Mountain. Alex and Emily are joined by feminist technosolutionism critics Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney to tear down the ways AI is proposed as a solution to structural inequality, including racism, ableism, and sexism -- and why this hype can occlude the need for more meaningful changes in institutions.

Dr. Eleanor Drage is a Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Dr. Kerry McInerney is a Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and a Research Fellow at the AI Now Institute. Together they host The Good Robot, a podcast about gender, feminism, and whether technology can be "good" in either outcomes or processes.

Watch the video version of this episode on PeerTube.

References:

HireVue promo: How Innovative Hiring Technology Nurtures Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Algorithm Watch: The [German Federal Asylum Agency]'s controversial dialect recognition software: new languages and an EU pilot project

Want to see how AI might be processing video of your face during a job interview? Play with React App, a tool that Eleanor helped develop to critique AI-powered video interview tools and the 'personality insights' they offer.

Philosophy & Technology: Does AI Debias Recruitment? Race, Gender, and AI’s “Eradication of Difference” (Drage & McInerney, 2022)

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies: Copies without an original: the performativity of biometric bordering technologies (Drage & Frabetti, 2023)

Fresh AI Hell

Internet of Shit 2.0: a "smart" bidet

Fake AI “students” enrolled at Michigan University

Synthetic images destroy online crochet groups

“AI” for teacher performance feedback

Palette cleanser: “Stochastic parrot” is the American Dialect Society’s AI-related word of the year for 2023!

You can check out future livestreams at https://twitch.tv/DAIR_Institute.

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Emily

Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmilyMBender
Mastodon: https://dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/emilymbender.bsky.social

Alex

Twitter: https://twitter.com/@alexhanna
Mastodon: https://dair-community.social/@alex
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alexhanna.bsky.social

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

Episode 24 - AI Won't Solve Structural Inequality (feat. Kerry McInerney & Eleanor Drage), January 8 2024

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000

Episode 24 - AI Won't Solve Structural Inequality (feat. Kerry McInerney & Eleanor Drage), January 8 2024