racism

At the beginning of this heartfelt, deeply researched inquiry into the history of mental illness in America’s Black population, journalist Antonia Hylton describes a regular meeting with a close relative in a park in Massachusetts. The relative – who does not want to be identified in the book – is suffering from a very specific paranoia: they believe that white supremacists are hunting them down.The relative has, Hylton writes, “covered up all of their windows with black gaffer tape… unplugged all their electronics,…

A new paper found that large language models from OpenAI, Meta, and Google, including multiple versions of ChatGPT, can be covertly racist against African Americans when analyzing a critical part of their identity: how they speak.No Google AI Search, I Don’t Need to Learn About the “Benefits of Slavery” Published in early March, the paper studied how large language models, or LLMs, carried out tasks, such as pairing people to certain jobs, based on whether the text analyzed was in African American English or Standard…

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week in AI, Google paused its AI chatbot Gemini’s ability to generate images of people after a segment of users complained about historical inaccuracies. Told to depict “a Roman legion,” for instance, Gemini would show an anachronistic, cartoonish group of racially…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain According to new research from Rice University and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, conservative-leaning job applicants indicate being less likely to pursue positions that require personal statements on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and those negative reactions are not independent of anti-Black racism. …

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Experts have long pointed out the need for white parents to have conversations that directly address racism with their children to reduce racial bias. But many parents fail to have these crucial discussions. Psychology researchers at Northwestern University have now published the first study to demonstrate the…

The head of the United Nations on Friday called for technology firms to stop profiting from the proliferation of toxic content after accusing social media platforms of complicity in fuelling antisemitism, racism and anti-Muslim bigotry."Tech companies should assume their responsibilities and stop profiting from the amplification of toxic content of all kinds," U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the Munich Security Conference.Elevate Your Tech Prowess with High-Value Skill CoursesOffering…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Anti-Black racism continues to be a major determinant of poor health and social outcomes for Black Canadians. Addressing this racism within Canadian institutions—like the health care system, justice system, the child welfare system and education—has far-reaching implications. The COVID-19 pandemic is a good example.…

It’s been a strange few weeks for Saturday Night Live. Two weeks ago, during a night hosted by Madame Web actress Dakota Johnson, cast members Bowen Yang and Sarah Sherman distanced themselves from Dave Chappelle when the transphobic comedian crashed SNL’s goodbye segment at show’s end. Then, last week, the show laundered Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s racist Civil War denialism. Now, America’s premier sketch-comedy series has decided to welcome Shane Gillis to host. Back in 2019, SNL announced…

Developers of artificial intelligence are well aware, and share the concern, that their large language models could perpetuate racial and cultural biases. In response, they have tried to assemble diverse development teams to make sure that training data are drawn from broadly representative sources and to apply debiasing algorithms, and they have created built-in safeguards such as programming that prohibits AI programs such as ChatGPT from engaging in hate speech.I thought I would try an experiment to determine just how…

The leading Asian American caucus in Congress has accused Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) of “racist” questioning of TikTok’s CEO at a congressional hearing this week.  In a hearing Wednesday, leaders from across big tech were summoned to testify on the issue of online child safety. In addition to TikTok, executives from Meta, X, Snap and Discord were accused by lawmakers of failing to protect children from online abuse and exploitation.  In the hearing, Cotton repeatedly asked TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew about…