Superbloom Studios Newsletter

Superbloom Studios Newsletter

December, 2022

What’s new? 

There has been a lot of talk about ChatGPT, the coolest new AI tool on the market developed by OpenAI. We have all seen AI chatbots before, right? What’s so cool about this one? ChatGPT provides human-like responses seamlessly on a wide variety of topics, and unlike its predecessors, shuts down questions about explicit bias. If you ask the bot to give you a sexist pick up line or a racist story, it shuts you down and rightfully so. And the bot can do SO much: It can write a perfectly believable conversation between a watermelon and a musk melon, explain calculus to a three year old with cartoon examples and other wildly impressive and more important things! 

While the technology is amazing, people have raised their concerns about it, sharing how the tool has implicit biases. While the AI is explicitly not racist or sexist, if you frame your prompt in a way that evades the tool from identifying it as racist, the tool has no problem in regurgitating racism and bias. Kanta Dihal, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge mentions that the hundreds and billions of words that the AI is trained has the human authors’ biases which the tool merely replicates when asked hard enough. The data that an AI tool is trained on is very important but she notes that it is an expensive and time consuming job to weed out racism and sexism (which can often be very subtle) before training a tool. One more issue with the tool is that it has the ability to make up citations out of thin air, mentioning authors who don’t exist and papers that do not exist, raising questions about the validity of the information that it does put out. 

In some positive news, the creators of the tool do mention clearly that the tool can provide misinformation and/or offensive outputs but  public feedback is making it better. For example, just a week ago, it was possible to use the tool to write offensive rap battles but now it is not. Though it might be time consuming and expensive, isn’t it important to weed out racism before we train these tools? Have you tried using it? What do you think?  Can it rise above the complaints of bias that have plagued other AI tools?

What we have been up to:

This month we would like to give you an update on “Hidden Voices'', our project in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras’ Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) which aims to reduce the gender data gap on digital platforms. It aims to do so by automatically generating biographies of several notable women to make a positive impact in gender representation on digital platforms like Wikipedia. We have seen how AI tools reproduce bias and that is why it is incredibly important to make existing data sources better and more inclusive. If you’d like to volunteer, sign up here and join our discord server. 

Hidden Voices’ project arc can be divided into three logical parts - (a) targeted crawling and scraping for a nominated person, (b) generating a fact base/knowledge base (KB) from the raw text and (c) generating a Wikipedia article from the said KB. To read more about the methodology click here.

Advisor Highlight: Ms. Sharon Rehbinder

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A colleague of Ms. Rehbinder praises her work like this: “In the world of international business relationships Sharon’s depth of knowledge and ability to understand cross-cultural issues has been extremely useful in developing alliances” and “she is also one of the most pleasant persons with whom I have worked.”

Sharon and Superbloom’s CEO Raji Baskaran met at a MEMs Executive Congress, discovered their like-mindedness, and have sustained a professional/personal relationship over the years that has led to Sharon becoming one of our Advisors.  

A French major in college led Sharon to the Press Department at the French Consulate, after which she continued at the “Invest in France” agency, and eventually became head of Communications for North America.  She has since spent 21 years working from the US for the Grenoble area in France, which the European Union has named the “Green Capitol” of the EU for 2022. 

Ms. Rehbinder’s specialties are in connections and business development, for start-ups through large multinationals in tech, with a concentration in micro- and nanotechnologies, energy technologies, all things digital, and medtech. She also works closely with stellar French labs such as the CEA Tech’s Leti and Liten.

She is active in the Los Angeles Venture Association (LAVA) as a board member and serves as co-chair of the international community “Global LAVA” and a member of the “Women in LAVA” committee. Sharon is also a member of French Founders and part of the French Cluster Los Angeles team.

As Superbloom Studios Advisor, she is looking forward to working with Entrepreneurs in US looking to grow/find partnerships in Europe and vice-versa.

Sharon is always happy to make pertinent connections and interested in meeting with US and Canadian corporate leaders, entrepreneurs and investors who’d like to connect with France’s innovators and with European companies seeking connections in the US and Canada.

What we are reading: Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble

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There has been a lot of coverage on how algorithms have affected things as big as democratically held elections in many countries of the world. Algorithms continue to shape the world around us but we often think of them as “neutral” since they are devoid of any human interference. Safiya Umoja Noble in her book, “Algorithms of Oppression” challenges the claim that algorithms are neutral and emphasizes that they reflect existing societal structures and biases. Someone created the algorithm and therefore their biases are codified into algorithmic decision making that most of us perceive as neutral, which is the central theme of the book. 

The author brings up many examples to showcase how algorithms are racist and sexist. She uses and drives the importance of having a “Black feminist” perspective when it comes to technology. One of the most prominent and distressing examples that she gives is how the search for “Black girls'' shows pornified results. While thankfully this has been amended, search engines are still not perfect providers of information. But in a world where we are more likely to go to the internet as opposed to a library for information, the author stresses on the need to make things better online. She mentions other examples of how certain search results being prioritized over others has had terrible consequences. Some examples include how the search for the word “Jew” brought up anti-semetic results that prompted Google to release a disclaimer and how racist sites are prioritized when someone searches up “black on white” crime. She also mentions how library classification systems also reflect racial hierarchies. The people who are entrusted with classifying information have a lot of power and that has been true in both the past and the present. That is one major reason why we must hold Google accountable. 

My favorite part of the book was when she delves into a person’s “right to be forgotten”. She mentions examples of how a teacher who quit porn and started teaching was fired from her job because she no longer could be a “good role model”. “Once it is on the internet, it’s going to be there forever" is something we often say but what about a person’s right to start over? She doesn’t ask this question for people who have committed heinous crimes or public officials but mentions how most people who ask to be erased from Google’s database are normal, everyday people. 

At the end of the book, she also interviews a hairdresser whose business has been impacted after a nearby college reduced affirmative action. She mentions how her business has been affected by platforms like “Yelp”. According to her, black people do not share much information online about what products/services they are using and that negatively affects black owned businesses. She laments that Yelp prioritizes results based on those who can afford to pay more. The author also illustrates that Google does the same with more visibility given to products of Google itself or corporations that have paid Google for advertisements. A lot of things have changed, some for the better and others for the worse, between the time the author started researching for and publishing the book. Nevertheless, it is a great read to understand how technology isn’t the neutral force that we usually proclaim it to be. While I understood how the problem presents itself, at the end of the book, I still couldn’t understand why exactly it happens. Yes, Google has the power to change search results but why do certain search results show up in the first place? Is it because of popularity, is it a mirror for society or is it a reflection of the lack of diversity that exists in spaces where this technology is made? I’m left with a lot more questions than answers but that is not always a bad thing! 

Product Spotlight: Teqnizan Inc. by Dr. Rama Prasad

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Created by Dr. Rama Prasad, “Teqnizan Inc.creates innovative electronics products for the modernist who appreciates the intersection of high tech and artisan design.” 

Have you ever struggled with earbuds that just don’t fit right or are uncomfortable? Teqnizan’s earrings might be the solution for you. Listen to music and your favourite podcast while going about your day with this innovative handsfree solution. 

This Christmas gift yourself or a loved one the sleek, stylish and hassle free all-in-one earrings and bluetooth solution!

Artist Highlight: AI art generated with Dall-E

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Here's to a happy new year!

This piece of art was created with Dall-E, an AI art tool developed by OpenAI (creators of ChatGPT). There have been multiple ethical and moral questions raised about AI art and its acceptabilities. You can read some more about it here and here.

Everyone at Superbloom Studios wishes you a very happy holiday season! 

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