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

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 (eleanordrage.com) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Dr. Kerry McInerney (kerrymcinerney.co.uk) 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 (bit.ly/47CL94r), 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 (bit.ly/3HmP0YM).

References:
HireVue promo: How Innovative Hiring Technology Nurtures Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (bit.ly/41ZUwdk)
Algorithm Watch: The [German Federal Asylum Agency]'s controversial dialect recognition software: new languages and an EU pilot project (bit.ly/3S07eEm)
Want to see how AI might be processing video of your face during a job interview? Play with React App (bit.ly/3O5aSeY), 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” (bit.ly/3HniOV5) (Drage & McInerney, 2022)
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies: Copies without an original: the performativity of biometric bordering technologies (bit.ly/3SlVc9x) (Drage & Frabetti, 2023)
Fresh AI Hell
Internet of Shit 2.0: a "smart" bidet (bit.ly/3HjPgrk)
Fake AI “students” enrolled at Michigan University (bit.ly/3U2XnQv)
Synthetic images destroy online crochet groups (bit.ly/3TZ8VVb)
“AI” for teacher performance feedback (bit.ly/48Zrgpp)
Palette cleanser: “Stochastic parrot” is the American Dialect Society’s AI-related word of the year for 2023 (bit.ly/3Otky3d)!
Check out future streams on Twitch (twitch.tv/dair_institute). Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see (thecon.ai/submit-fresh-ai-hell).
Find our book The AI Con here (bit.ly/3OZ9PNx), and MAIHT3k merch here (store.dair-institute.org/category/mystery-ai-h…).
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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park (naomipleasurepark.com).
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.