Artificial intelligence could change the world but the dearth of women in the booming sector will undermine pledges for inclusive technology, top computer scientistWendy Halltold AFP on Friday.
Hall, a professor at Britain’s University of Southampton known for her pioneering research into web systems, said that the gender imbalance had long been stark.
“All the CEOs are men,” the 73-year-old said, describing the situation at a major AI summit held in New Delhi this week as “amazingly awful”.
“It’s totally male-dominated, and they just don’t get the fact that this means that 50 percent of the population is effectively not included in the conversations.”
Gender bias “creeps through everything, because they don’t think about it when they build their products”, Hall said.
She was speaking in an interview at the AI Impact Summit, where dozens of governments are expected to lay out a shared vision on how to handle the promises and pitfalls of generative AI.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is pushing for India to become a global AI power, said Thursday that advanced computing systems “must become a medium for inclusion and empowerment”.
But when he posed on stage for a photo with leading tech business figures, 13 men were present and only one woman — Joelle Pineau, a former Meta researcher who is now chief AI officer at Cohere.
It was a similar story at another photo opportunity with world leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
‘Biased world’Many studies have shown how generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini reflect stereotypes contained in the vast reams of text and images they are trained on.
Source: Insider Paper
