Take Action: White House, Focus Now on Community Impact of AI

The White House has opened up a process to start building a Bill of Rights for AI - which could guide the federal government to regulate how its own agencies use these tools, our rights to challenge what they say about us, and even keep the government from buying or using technologies that don’t respect our rights and civil liberties. But if the White House doesn’t hear from us, the rich and well organized voices of big companies that build these tools will drown us out, and big companies and our government will prioritize the large profits money they make from artificial intelligence, rather than the rights of the people surveilled and judged by it.

We have a rare chance with the Biden administration to limit the ways in which technology hurts our communities.

You can send a letter right now to Dr. Eric Lander and Dr. Alondra Nelson at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy by adapting the template letter below, and clicking SEND. This letter will be a part of the public record as the White House works to build a Bill of Rights for AI.

Send your message

Dear Dr. Eric Lander and Dr. Alondra Nelson,

Thank you for the opportunity to submit comments regarding the impact of artificial intelligence on the lives of our members and the communities we fight for. I strongly support the White House craft a Bill of Rights for AI - and push with every measure at its disposal to ensure that federal agencies, local and state governments, and private companies do not impede our individual and community rights if and when they use powerful algorithms to make decisions about our lives.

Algorithmic discrimination poses enormous risks - it is cloaked in a veil of objectivity, hard to detect and harder to prove, and can worsen racial and economic inequality in critical areas of life. Most people do not even know the role that AI plays in their ability to get a job, find good housing, or get an affordable loan. As a result, this lack of transparency presents major roadblocks to seeking legal redress when violations occur, and there is minimal guidance or regulation directing how our civil rights and liberties laws apply to AI.

Systemic racism is often reflected in the outcome that an AI system is meant to predict, such as in criminal legal system uses, or in housing, employment and credit. Numerous instances of AI/ML bias have been reported. When Amazon tested a hiring algorithm that it had created using training data from prior applicants for Amazon jobs, who were primarily white men, the algorithm found the correlation and predicted a link between being male and success at Amazon and then weeded out applicants whose resumes included words associated with being a woman. 1. And in February 2020, a report issued by the Student Borrower Protection Center found that a fintech lender using borrower’s educational and current employment data in its model to market increased access and lower interest rates over traditional lending models – charged higher interest rates and loan origination fees for borrowers who attended Howard University, a historically Black university or “HBCU,” or New Mexico State University, which principally enrolls Latinx students, when compared with a similarly situated New York University graduate. 2.
 
Given the speed, scale and consequence of AI decision-making, to achieve systemic equality, we must ensure that AI systems are accountable to the people they impact and that they comply with our civil rights and civil liberties laws.    
 
We are asking you to use our comments across the Biden Administration, in engaging with agencies, and in communicating with our legislators, as support for limiting the bias in AI and in the decisions that use them.

1. How Amazon Accidentally Invented a Sexist Hiring Algorithm | Inc.com
2. Student Borrower Protection Center, Educational Redlining (2020); CFPB, An Update on Credit Access and the Bureau’s First No-Action Letter (2019).

Thank you,

Sincerely,

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