The future of AI is interdisciplinary
Canada Research Chair in Technology and Social Change is advancing artificial intelligence with more diverse human experiences
By听Wendy Philpott
Faculty of Arts听
Dr.听Lai-Tze Fan听wants to make a more equitable AI. Critical approaches to advancing artificial intelligence are urgent, she says. 鈥淲e tend to want AI to do more and more tasks for us and not be involved ourselves. But if that tendency continues, critical thinking in the process of generation is going to collapse in on itself and we won't have a responsible role in the technology anymore. And that could make AI a dehumanizing tool.鈥
An Assistant Professor in Sociology and Legal听Studies, Fan was recently announced as a听Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Technology and Social Change.听In fact her work is richly interdisciplinary, combining media studies, science and technology studies, interactive storytelling, critical design, and research-creation. Her CRC program examines technological design and bias in AI 鈥 鈥渟omething that鈥檚 been on everybody鈥檚 mind these days.鈥
By investigating the design of sexist, racist, and classist AI voice assistant software, racist facial recognition systems, and exploitative AI hardware production, she is working to identify how AI produces human experiences that reinforce social inequalities. And she wants to change that.
Fan鈥檚 goal is to encourage and enhance equity, diversity, and inclusion in AI design and to improve technological literacy.
Of course the speed of AI advances is a challenge for everyone, she says, as Open AI forges ahead, pushing other companies to move faster and work on more ways to integrate AI into our everyday lives. 鈥淭hey're developing day-to-day, and the CEO of Open AI himself is addressing issues of governance and regulation. But this has always been an issue with tech industry versus legislation and governance: it develops so fast that regulators cannot keep up.鈥
Creating equitable human-AI experiences
Fan鈥檚 CRC research will be based in her Unseen-AI Lab (U&AI Lab) and engage interdisciplinary collaborators to develop approaches that prevent inequitable AI at the design and production stage. Her research plan includes three case studies on software, hardware, and big data 鈥 all focused through an equity lens.
In the first, Fan is looking at how inequities and stereotypes found in human labour are transferred to our experiences interacting with an AI assistant. She gives an example: 鈥淲hat would it look like to have a feminist Siri where, if you used abusive language towards her, she just shuts off?鈥 Working with colleagues, Fan aims write more equitable software scripts, and in this way, design civility and fairness into the user experience.
For the hardware study, Fan will develop VR experiences to educate and expose people to the environmental consequences of the ever-growing demand for superpowered computers and more/newer personal devices in our daily life.
The third study examines the inherent racism of big data used for facial recognition technology 鈥 which are trained primarily on databases of white faces. Given these databases simply don鈥檛 have enough diverse faces, Fan wants to rebuild and expand the data. 鈥淚t鈥檚 ambitious, but why not build one?鈥 Of course, to ensure the biodata collection and management is equitable, this work will involve collaborators with ethics expertise, she adds.
It has to be interdisciplinary
Now based in 蓝莓视频鈥檚 Department of Sociology and Legal Studies, Fan鈥檚 academic career has traversed English literature to media studies to technology studies and research-creation. By her postdoctoral studies, she found 鈥渋t didn't make sense to be disciplinary anymore.鈥 Today she is an experienced practitioner of digital installations, digital storytelling, creative coding, and game design. To date she鈥檚 had 23听solo and collaborative research-creation projects, including collaborations with MIT, Georgia Tech, and 蓝莓视频鈥檚 Institute for Quantum Computing.
鈥淭his work has to be interdisciplinary,鈥 says Fan who is inviting researchers and students from a range of STEM, humanities and social science disciplines to collaborate in the U&AI Lab. She welcomes interested faculty, staff, and students to write her directly, even if they haven't had a chance to meet her yet. 鈥淐omputer science and engineering students will be able to help us examine the risks and benefits of AI technologies that they鈥檙e currently learning to design and produce. Students from the social sciences and humanities trained in critical theories of gender, race, and class, as well as qualitative and quantitative methods, can tackle real-world evolving issues in AI industry and policy.鈥
Combining this breadth of expertise and experience in her CRC research, Fan will contribute to AI design in research and industry, improve technological literacy, and most important, strengthen equity, diversity and inclusion in human-AI experiences.