Unmasking AI
by Joy Buolamwini
MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini exposes the 'coded gaze' - how AI systems discriminate against women and people of color.
"The rising frontier for civil rights will require algorithmic justice. AI should be for the people and by the people, not just the privileged few.".
Editorial Summary
MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini chronicles her journey from graduate student to algorithmic justice advocate in this memoir and manifesto about AI bias. After discovering that facial recognition software couldn't detect her dark skin unless she wore a white mask, Buolamwini coined the term 'coded gaze' to describe how discrimination becomes embedded in AI systems. The book traces her path from high school robotics in Memphis to developing mobile apps in Zambia as a Fulbright fellow, and finally to MIT's Media Lab where her groundbreaking research exposed widespread racial and gender bias in AI services from major tech companies. Buolamwini founded the Algorithmic Justice League and became a leading voice for algorithmic accountability, testifying before Congress and pushing for AI regulation. Her research was featured in the Netflix documentary Coded Bias.
Perspective
"Unmasking AI is a memoir that becomes a manifesto — Buolamwini's personal story of discovering her own invisibility to facial recognition systems makes the abstract problem of algorithmic bias impossible to look away from. The distinctive contribution is the 'coded gaze' concept: a precise term for the phenomenon of discrimination encoded into AI systems through training data and benchmark design choices, which gives advocates a vocabulary for a problem that was previously hard to name. Anyone building AI systems that will interact with diverse populations — or trying to hold such systems accountable — will find Buolamwini's framework both practically and morally clarifying."
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