THE FUTURE IS NOW // A FILM REVIEW OF "CODED BIAS"
You wouldn't be wrong to feel that throughout the new documentary CODED BIAS that it was starting to feel like some sort of narrative film. That it might be science fiction. We all have smart phones, computers and live in the digital age. But could so many Orwellian "Big Brother" type spying tactics be real? The answer, sadly, is yet. CODED BIAS is a documentary and it is indeed based on a true story. That story is our story, and the lives we live while others track and grade us far beyond the digital walls of so-called secrecy.
The film follows a few different people, but the main subject is Joy Buolamwini, a young African American MIT Media Lab researcher. While working on a project that had to do with Artificial Intelligence Facial Recognition, she was having trouble with it reading her face. She tried multiple things to get it to work, to no avail. As a last resort she put on a plain white mask and instantly it recognized her. This lead to a huge discovery: most facial recognition software is not accurate when it comes to people of color. The biggest percentage of faces it correctly recognizes are white men. She's blown away and starts a full on investigation into how AI software itself can hold the biases, even unknown biases, of the humans who create it.
We also see a young activist in London who warns passerby not to go past an unmarked police van, telling them that they are actually scanning faces for possible criminal matches but that the results are wildly incorrect. One young man ends up passing the van and covers his face. Immediately, the Police pull him to the side of the street and question him on why he's "covering up." Both the man and the activist explain to them that no one would want their face scanned in such a matter and all they get in reply is, "Well, it makes you look suspicious (not to mention one officer ends up agreeing that the software is pretty faulty.)" The man who got stopped? He ended up getting a ticket for covering his face, even though he didn't actually match any criminal records on their end. We also later see a 14-year-old black student get pulled over because he "matched" the profile of an adult criminal. None of this is "normal" and none of it should be allowed.
On the flip side, we see a young girl in China, a country that actually gives their residents human credit scores which decides where they can live, what job they can have, and how they are treated in society. The young girl explains that she actually likes the scanning, arguing that now when she meets someone she can just "skip the time to get to know each other" and judge them solely based on their credit score. It's even more terrifying to hear her calmly say it, as if we are witnessing Black Mirror in real life. It's clear that in today's society, with all of us using the internet and credit cards for almost everything, we are giving our data over and over. But the selling of our data, and how the government uses it, is one of the real issues here. One battle that Buolamwini faces is how AI intelligence is being sold to the Police as a way of monitoring us.
So how do we fight against a system that seems to know us already? Already, 117 million Americans are in the "AI database" and more often than not they do not match up correctly, especially for people of color (they run a test at one point, putting lawmakers into the system and it misreads them as criminals. Not exactly reassuring). Director Shalini Kantayya has crafted a terrifying doc here, one that's very important and incredibly timely. Man versus Machine, as every dystopian sci-fi movie taught us, is truly becoming a reality. Yet we are the ones plugging more and more information into these machines. We can turn this around. We can alter the future. But will we? After watching this masterful film, you may think twice about your answer.
GRADE: A
DIRECTED BY Shalini Kantayya FEATURING Joy Buolamwini, Cathy O'Neil, Virginia Eubanks, Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble, Dr. Zeynep Tufekci, Silkie Carlo, Ravi Naik, Meredith Broussard. Now playing in Select Theatres and on Digital Cinemas. For more info: https://www.codedbias.com/