Coming to AIFF’s Virtual “Best of the Fests”
CODED BIAS
January 15-21 / Tickets: $10
Featuring a pre-recorded post-film Q&A with director Shalini Kantayya and researcher Joy Buolamwini, moderated by CNN Commentator Van Jones.
AIFF, joining with community partners Project A and Ashland Home Net, is excited to present Coded Bias, a documentary by filmmaker Shalini Kantayya exploring the dangers of Artificial Intelligence. The film focuses on MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini who discovers that most facial-recognition software misidentifies both women and darker-skinned faces. The documentary explores the unconscious bias embedded into technology that is used daily, by exploring the ways algorithms repeat and reinforce the unconscious prejudices of their original programmers. Vividly bringing to light the dangers of living in a society where we are scored daily by technology that contains an inherent bias, the film highlights how AI works against already marginalized people.
"The most cleareyed of several recent documentaries about the perils of Big Tech (The Great Hack,The Social Dilemma), Coded Bias tackles its sprawling subject by zeroing in empathetically on the human costs." Devika Girish, NY Times
Coded Bias weaves a history of the small homogeneous group of men who defined artificial intelligence and forged the culture of Silicon Valley--a culture that is already reshaping the world. Emboldened by troubling discoveries, Buolamwini charts a way forward by joining the ranks of other concerned experts to form a justice league committed to the more humane and ethical use of the AI systems that will shape the future. What researcher Buolamwini learns about widespread bias in algorithms drives her to push the U.S. government to create the first-ever legislation to counter the far-reaching dangers of bias in a technology that is steadily encroaching on our lives.
Filmmaker Shalini Kantayya’s feature documentary Coded Bias premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. She is a TED Fellow, a William J. Fulbright Scholar, and a finalist for the ABC Disney DGA Directing Program. An Associate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Kantayya finished in the top 10 out of 12,000 filmmakers on Fox’s On the Lot, a show by Steven Spielberg in search of Hollywood’s next great director.
Director: Shalini Kantayya
Producers: Shalini Kantayya, Sabine Hoffman
Writer: Shalini Kantayya
Running Time: 90 minutes
Year: 2020
