BACKGROUND & CONTEXT

Gender, understood intersectionally, remains a significant determinate of who participates in AI fields, technologies, and labs, and of how we are affected by AI technologies. 

Beyond representation as researchers and professionals in the field, gender is fraught, conceptually, within AI systems. In order to recommend products or music, or generate text or images, algorithms make a variety of assumptions about gender that often are not aligned with current understandings of what gender is, how it should be encoded, and how a gender variable should be ethically used.   

In Spring 2023, Concordia’s Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute was awarded a $200 000 research grant through the Commission des partenaires du marché du travail to improve gender equity within AI/STEM sectors. The proposed research, led by Dr. Lindsay Rodgers, enacted a community-based action methodology to collaboratively establish meaningful trajectories for the project. Thus, an interdisciplinary working group, Affecting Machines, was launched. This initial iteration of Affecting Machines was made up of researchers, community representatives, and AI professionals who work to create practical tools for those interested in improving gender equity.   

OUR MANDATE & TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT

Affecting Machines is an interdisciplinary and feminist working group that operates out of the Concordia Applied AI Institute. We approach AI, not as a neutral technological domain, but as a social, cultural, and emotional field shaped by the histories and hierarchies of labour, knowledge. Our work is rooted in the recognition that AI systems are relational and as such do not exist outside the relationships between people, institutions, data, infrastructure, funding, states, and so on. Therefore, our central question asks what AI does in relation to whom.  

We reimagine AI labs, including our own, not only as sites of innovation, but as ecosystems where all social actors are accounted for, perspectives at the margins are amplified, and possibilities for collective flourishing are centered.  Through this project, we seek to affect machines through intersectional feminist methodologies, engaging data ethics of care, to contribute to the development and deployment of equitable systems.

Members of this working group recognize that:

• AI technologies are both products and producers of social relations that have historically defined and constructed gender.
• AI technologies shape and limit how we interact with the world 
• AI technologies provide necessarily partial and limited versions of what is possible