Laura Carter

There is scientific consensus that AI can exacerbate bias and discrimination in society: even when its developers have the best of intentions. I'm proud to be one of the more than 140 academic researchers to sign a statement affirming this consensus and stating in no uncertain terms the need for appropriate mitigations to the harms that this bias and discrimination can cause.

We, the undersigned researchers, affirm the scientific consensus that artificial intelligence (AI) can exacerbate bias and discrimination in society, and that governments need to enact appropriate guardrails and governance in order to identify and mitigate these harms.

Over the past decade, thousands of scientific studies have shown how biased AI systems can violate civil and human rights, even if their users and creators are well-intentioned. When AI systems perpetuate discrimination, their errors make our societies less just and fair. Researchers have observed this same pattern across many fields, including computer science, the social sciences, law, and the humanities. Yet while scientists agree on the common problem of bias in AI, the solutions to this problem are an area of ongoing research, innovation, and policy.

These facts have been a basis for bipartisan and global policymaking for nearly a decade. We urge policymakers to continue to develop public policy that is rooted in and builds on this scientific consensus, rather than discarding the bipartisan and global progress made thus far.

The full list of signatories is here: https://www.aibiasconsensus.org/

I’ve been training to become a trainer with the Digital Rights Academy. As part of this, I prepared and delivered a one-off training session: an introduction to the reference management software Zotero.

Zotero is open source, free,* and made my life much easier when reading for and writing up my PhD (which ended up with 1,000+ citations…). But it can also be a bit intimidating for new researchers, especially for students in humanities subjects who might never have used any kind of research software in the past. So I designed this training to be as accessible as possible, and to start from the beginning: how to add information about your references (metadata), how to use Zotero’s plugins to add research papers directly from journal webpages, and how to use it in Word to generate citations.

The slides from the training are available here if you’d like to see the information that we covered. And if you’d like to see the DRA run this again, please do get in touch!

* If you use it a lot, you may end up wanting to pay for increased storage—I did—but the free version gives you enough storage to play around with and find out if you like using it. I recommend not upgrading until you need to.

The Feminist Review Trust was founded in 2001. The Feminist Review, an academic journal, was making a profit: the Trust was a way for a small group of socialist feminists to redistribute those profits into feminist projects worldwide. Over two decades, the Trust distributed over half a million pounds to nearly 200 projects, across five continents.

I became a Trustee in 2017. The Trust never had any paid staff: it was the job of the Trustees to review the hundreds of grant applications we received each round, and then, three times a year, to meet to deliberate over which ones we could fund. Each funding round, I sat with my colleagues—feminists from different generations, backgrounds and experiences to me—as we deliberated over which projects to fund.

It wasn’t ever an easy process. We never had enough money to fund everything that we wanted to. We prioritised projects that we thought would struggle to find support elsewhere, and feminists in countries with less infrastructural support. We didn’t look for scalability, or even always ongoing work: we wanted to fund transformative change, and that didn’t always mean big projects. We trusted that our grantees knew what was needed in different contexts, and tried not to burden them with too many reporting requirements.

We didn’t always get it right. Occasionally, grantees would vanish after receiving the funds (but not nearly as often as we might have feared). Sometimes they wouldn’t be able to deliver on the project that they proposed, but almost always they’d come back with justifications for the delay, or reasons why they wanted to reallocate our funding. We almost always said yes.

When the Trust closed its doors, we commissioned two reports. One looking backwards: a history of the Trust. And one looking forwards: an evaluation of what we did and what we learned from it, in the hope that it might be useful to other (and future) feminist funding. There is more support for feminist organising now, and different models of funding: but still not nearly enough.

I'm proud to have been a Trustee. I learned an enormous amount from my fellow Trustees, and from the feminists that we funded over the years. I'll miss our meetings and my colleagues, and I'll miss finding out about the amazing work that feminists around the world were able to do with the (really, quite tiny amounts of) money that we were able to send to them.

Our papers are archived at LSE, and copies of both reports are at the Copyright Libraries. When we finished the winding down of the Trust, we had a small amount of money left over. In our final political feminist act, we donated it to Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Over on the OLS* slack, the community coordinator came across—and reposted—a blog post that I wrote a couple of years ago: The Human Rights Case for Open Science.**

It prompted a question from another OLS participant, who had had unsatisfying experiences as a citizen scientist:***

If participants in citizen science contribute their labour to support the project, but it only benefits the project organisers, is this a human rights issue?

I've been working in the human rights field for more than a decade now, so I tend to think everything is a human rights issue, in the sense that you can use a human rights lens to look at the question.

The short answer is yes: but the human rights framework might not be the best way to fix the problem.

The bit of human rights law to start with is probably Articles 6-8 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which cover the rights to work, to just and favourable conditions of work, and to form trades unions. It's a bit tricky to apply this to citizen science projects though, where participation ought to be voluntary – not just in the sense of unpaid (though this is often the case!), but also that people can stop being involved at any point.

Citizen scientists who don't like a project should just be able to walk away. It's on the project organiser to set up a project that people want to be involved in, whether because they think the issue is important, they want to learn about doing science, or they want to be part of a community, or any other reason.

Problems arise when project organisers don't deliver on the benefits that they promised, or when citizen scientists can't walk away. If this rises to the level of coercion—for example, withholding services unless someone agrees to do data collection work—then in some circumstances this might rise to the level of a human rights abuse. I’m not aware of any community science projects where this has happened! This kind of abuse is much more common in other industries, for example agriculture or construction: you can read more about this in the work of organisations like Anti-Slavery International.

But more often it's going to look like a project organiser taking credit for the work of others, or reaping the benefits of a successful project (in prestige, citations, or grants) while the citizen scientists don't benefit. Or sometimes, it might look like a bullying project organiser making someone feel guilty if they want to step away. Those kinds of situations don't feel nice for the participants, but they are unlikely to rise to the level of human rights abuses.

So in those kinds of situations, the best recourse probably isn't going to be the human rights system (fond as I am of it). If you want to stay involved with a project,**** your best option for improving it is probably going to be organising.

Unionisation is protected by Article 8 of the ICESCR, but there are lots of other ways to work for change. There's a chapter in the Turing Way***** on activism for researchers: it's written for professional data scientists, but almost all of it is applicable to anyone who wants to change how they do science for the better.

* I've been a participant, and a couple of times a mentor, for OLS's Open Science training, which I highly recommend for anyone interested in science and community building.

** The blog was originally written for Open Heroines who are also worth checking out if you're a women or non-binary person interested in open data.

*** I initially wrote an answer on the OLS slack. But slack messages are private and transient: this is an edited, expanded, and public version!

**** But you don't have to! Volunteer Amnesty Day exists for a reason.

***** The Turing Way is a guide to collaborative, reproducible and ethical research: there's a lot in here about how to do collaborative science well! I was a contributor to the Guide for Ethical Research—in fact, that was my first OLS project!—and wrote some of the Activism content. If you're interested in getting involved, I recommend starting with the contribution guidelines.