The Whiteness of AI
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The Whiteness of AI Stephen Cave 1
& Kanta
Dihal 1
Received: 3 January 2020 / Accepted: 28 June 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper focuses on the fact that AI is predominantly portrayed as white—in colour, ethnicity, or both. We first illustrate the prevalent Whiteness of real and imagined intelligent machines in four categories: humanoid robots, chatbots and virtual assistants, stock images of AI, and portrayals of AI in film and television. We then offer three interpretations of the Whiteness of AI, drawing on critical race theory, particularly the idea of the White racial frame. First, we examine the extent to which this Whiteness might simply reflect the predominantly White milieus from which these artefacts arise. Second, we argue that to imagine machines that are intelligent, professional, or powerful is to imagine White machines because the White racial frame ascribes these attributes predominantly to White people. Third, we argue that AI racialised as White allows for a full erasure of people of colour from the White utopian imaginary. Finally, we examine potential consequences of the racialisation of AI, arguing it could exacerbate bias and misdirect concern. Keywords Artificial intelligence . Robots . Critical race studies . Racialisation .
Anthropomorphism . Whiteness
Overall, I construe race, racialization, and racial identities as on-going sets of political relations that require, through constant perpetuation via institutions, discourses, practices, desires, infrastructures, languages, technologies, sciences, economies, dreams, and cultural artefacts, the barring of nonwhite subjects from the category of the human as it is performed in the modern west. Alexander G. Weheliye (Weheliye 2014, 2) Technology as an abstract concept functions as a white mythology. Joel Dinerstein (Dinerstein 2006, 570)
* Stephen Cave [email protected]
1
Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
S. Cave, K. Dihal
1 Introduction It is a truth little acknowledged that a machine in possession of intelligence must be white. Typing terms like “robot” or “artificial intelligence” into a search engine will yield a preponderance of stock images of white plastic humanoids. Perhaps more notable still, these machines are not only white in colour, but the more human they are made to look, the more their features are made ethnically White.1 In this paper, we problematize the often unnoticed and unremarked-upon fact that intelligent machines are predominantly conceived and portrayed as White. We argue that this Whiteness both illuminates particularities of what (Anglophone Western) society hopes for and fears from these machines, and situates these affects within long-standing ideological structures that relate race and technology. Race and technology are two of the most powerful and important categories for understanding the world as it has developed since at least the early modern period. Yet, as a number of scholars have noted, their profound entanglement
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