CODED BIAS explores the fallout of MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini’s startling discovery that facial recognition does not recognize dark-skinned individuals accurately, and her journey to push for the first-ever U.S. legislation to govern against racial bias in algorithms that impact us daily.
CODED BIAS premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, and was Official Selection at SXSW. It was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and a Critics’ Choice Award for Outstanding Documentary, and won three SIMA Awards including Best Director.
CODED BIAS was certified 100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and The New York Times named it one of the Best Films of 2020 and “the most clear-eyed of the recent documentaries on Big Tech” (among others like The Great Hack,The Social Dilemma).
CODED BIAS tackles its sprawling subject by zeroing in empathetically on the human costs.” The film has earned rave reviews by The New York Times, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety and more. You can view the trailer here.
The question of ethics in A.I. is more timely than ever, particularly in the wake of the recent news around Google’s firing of Timnit Gebru, former co-leader of Google’s Ethical A.I. team, (who is also featured in the doc, and one of few black women on Google’s A.I. team).
Buolamwini refers to herself as a “poet of code” and is a strong advocate for more poets and people of color in tech. And as a filmmaker, Shalini’s work is focused on uncovering the impact of disruptive technologies on issues of civil rights and equality. They can speak to what the racial and gender bias built into artificial intelligence algorithms means for civil rights; the need for inclusion in the development of the technologies that will define our future; why this film is so important now, as machine learning figures more heavily into our daily lives than ever.
