Google has partnered with GLAAD to make A.I. more inclusive

“A.I. has the potential for amazing benefits, but also has the potential to widen social divisions and further harm marginalised communities like LGBTQ people."

Source: Twitter, Getty Images

This week, LGBTIQ+ organisation GLAAD has announced a new collaboration with Jigsaw - a unit within Google's parent company Alphabet - in a large-scale effort to make online conversations more inclusive for members of the LGBTIQ+ community.

The announcement was made during a panel at SXSW titled The Digital War Against Bias, and suggests an ongoing plan to make Google's Artificial Intelligence more LGBTIQ+ inclusive.

The partnership began after GLAAD noticed the algorithmic censorship and bias faced by some members of the community.

In one instance, last year it was revealed that Google's Cloud Natural Language API, which analyses statements to find out whether they’re positive or negative, was biased in its belief that being gay was bad.

The program offers users a “Sentiment” score from -1 up to +1 depending on how positive it thinks your sentence is. It soon emerged that the API was giving negative scores to sentences involving being gay.

The Google program scores sentences based on perceived positivity. Source: Google, Motherboard

At the time, a Google spokesperson responded with a statement saying: "We dedicate a lot of efforts to making sure the NLP API avoids bias, but we don't always get it right. This is an example of one of those times, and we are sorry."

According to Jigsaw Product Manager CJ Adams, it's all about engaging with the queer community to develop meaningful solutions.

“Our mission is to help communities have great conversations at scale," he said.

He continued: "We can't be content to let computers adopt negative biases from the abuse and harassment targeted groups face online. We are grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with GLAAD and others in creating public research resources which can help improve the models we make and advance the field of bias-mitigation research through an open and collaborative process,”

“A.I. has the potential for amazing benefits, but also has the potential to widen social divisions and further harm marginalised communities like LGBTQ people,” added Jim Halloran, Chief Digital Officer at GLAAD.

“That is why it is crucial that we are collaborating with important organisations like Google to build inclusive A.I. that accelerates acceptance for all people.”