I recently had the opportunity to speak with Shalini Kantayya, filmmaker and director of Coded Bias. Coded Bias premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim. It was broadcast nationally on Emmy-award winning series Independent Lens and can be streamed on Netflix globally starting April 5th. The film won a SIMA Award for Best Director, and has been nominated for a Critics’ Choice Award, and a NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary, among others.
Shalini’s debut feature, Catching the Sun, premiered at the LA Film Festival and was named a NY Times Critics’ Pick. Catching the Sun released globally on Netflix on Earth Day 2016 with Executive Producer Leonardo DiCaprio, and was nominated for the Environmental Media Association Award for Best Documentary. She directed the season finale of the National Geographic television series Breakthrough, Executive Produced by Ron Howard, broadcast globally in June 2017. She also directed for NOVA and YouTube Originals.
Shalini is a TED Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, and an Associate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
I met Shalini through the TED network in 2017 and I remember being moved by her passion for storytelling. I believe Coded Bias is one of the most important documentaries of our time. It exposes the numerous unconscious and conscious biases that are being coded into facial recognition algorithms and artificial intelligence technology threatening human rights and civil liberties everywhere. The themes the documentary exposes are the reasons why I founded BE MORE. They are also the reason why I believe we cannot policy our way out of bias. We have to train human beings who build code to break racial and other forms of bias so they can build more humane and equitable technologies.
I recently caught up with Shalini about Coded Bias, how she got interested in this subject, and get her perspective on what needs to happen to break bias in technology. Below are some highlights from our conversation.
~Anu
AG: Shalini, you’ve had a dynamic career as a filmmaker, artist, and activist. How did you get started?
SK: Before making Coded Bias, everything I knew about artificial intelligence was transmitted through the imagination of sci-fi filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick. The themes in Andrew Niccol's 90's sci-fi Gattaca, which depicts the power of the human spirit to transcend genetic predictions, continues to inspire me.
A lot of my work has to do with disruptive technology, and whether disruptive technologies make the world more fair or less fair, and for whom. My last film explored small-scale solar as a sort of utopian vehicle for uplifting the working class and the middle class in the US.
Like many of us, I was just sleepwalking through these technologies that are making decisions and predictions about our behavior all the time. Coming from outside of the industry, I did not understand that already today, AI is making decisions as intimate as who gets what quality of healthcare, who gets a job, who gets into college, how long a prison sentence someone serves, who gets undued police scrutiny.
AG: Absolutely and what is more terrifying is how the unconscious biases people have are being coded into these technologies to maintain inequality. With that said, there are so many other pressing issues humanity faces today -- tell us why you undertook this project in particular and how it imagines a way of breaking bias?
SK: I sort of stumbled upon the work of Joy Buolamwini and other authors in the film—Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction, Safiya Umoja Noble's book Algorithms of Oppression, and Meredith Broussard’s book Artificial Unintelligence. I fell down the rabbit hole of the dark underbelly of the technologies that we're interacting with every day.
What I learned in making the film—which stands on the foundation of probably three decades of scholarship and activism and research, mostly by women, people of color, and LGBTQ communities who have been speaking the truth about what's happening in Silicon Valley—is that these technologies have not been vetted for racial bias for gender bias, or even accuracy or fairness. And they exist in these black boxes that we can't examine as a society. What I began to see in the making of Coded Bias is that AI is where the battle for civil rights and democracy will happen in the 21st century.
AG: Which should be a rallying point for all us to get educated about AI. For me, this is why watching your documentary is an absolute must for everyone. Could you share with our community members why they should pay attention to this topic and how technology is defining race in our everyday life?
SK: Everything we love, everything we care about as citizens of a democracy is going to be totally transformed by artificial intelligence—in fact, is in the process of being transformed. AI systems are often the most invisible, automated, first-line gatekeepers to every opportunity we have, and they are rarely vetted for bias or even accuracy.
Just as we need conscious checks on our own biases, facial recognition software needs that as well.
It is my hope that Coded Bias will help demystify how algorithms work and that the conversations sparked by the film will lead us towards building technology from a deeper place within our humanity. I hope that people will start to question this blind faith we have in technological systems, and peel away that magic to see that technology is only as good as the human in it.
AG: Such powerful words to end on. Thank you for your time and for your creative passion to bring this important project to life.
You can watch Coded Bias anywhere in the world with a Netflix subscription, starting April 5th. As I mentioned earlier, I believe it is one of the most important documentaries of this century. I hope you will take the time to watch it and discuss what you learn with us and your communities.
To learn more about Shalini, visit her website and follow her onTwitter, Facebook, and Instagram.