When you think of systematic racism, you need to be thinking of the subtle stuff as well as the more brazen stuff like restaurants banning non-whites from entering or people of colour getting longer prison sentences for the same crime. Actually, the subtle stuff is insidious, because people don’t think it’s racism.

Reminds me of Google classifying black people as gorillas in their photo app.

People were saying “oh well it’s just a limitation of the technology, it was just an accident” no! That’s now how AI works! What happened was they didn’t consider black people/indigenous people/etc worthy enough to put enough of them in the training data. That’s not better than them intentionally doing it!

inb4 “the technology is still immature/in beta, they’ll get better at identifying people of colour in the future!”

That’s not how that works either! You have a responsibility to be inclusive to the best of your ability from day one! If you’re not doing that, not exaggerating, you’re better off not making the product at all.

And it’s not like a giant tech company didn’t have the resources to make it inclusive.

These aren’t pretend arguments I’m making up either. People genuinely say those things and think they’re valid excuses for this.