Diversity and AI

Ellen (Hear Me)

Teens in AI’s Accelerator program is a great opportunity for youth to discover artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as working on their own project. My team worked on a project to help the deaf and hearing-impaired and was formed during the French edition of the Girls in AI Hackathon. I’m grateful for the opportunity because it’s difficult for teenagers, especially girls, to get experience in AI.

During the program, I learned that bias is bad for machine learning. As Caroline Chavier mentions in her TED talk Diversity & Women in Artificial Intelligence, machine learning algorithms might not be biased, but they might use data that is. She encourages hiring diverse AI creators from the start and she reminds us that diversity is not just about gender but includes all underrepresented groups. In her TED talk Artificial Intelligence needs all of us, Rachel Thomas sums it up by saying it is “dangerous [to have] an exclusive and homogeneous group creating technology that impacts us all”.

Here are some interesting TED talks on the topic:

Caroline Chavier: Diversity & Women in Artificial Intelligence

Rachel Thomas: Artificial Intelligence needs all of us

Eva Prakash: Why Diversity Matters for the Future of Artificial Intelligence

Josie Young: Why we need to design feminist AI

Kriti Sharma: How to keep human bias out of AI

I wish AI (and computer science in general) could be taught in all high schools around the world. The more people learn about it, the more diverse and unbiased machine learning will be.