More than Skin Deep: a Response to “The Whiteness of AI”

Abstract

This commentary responds to Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal’s (2020) call for further investigations of the whiteness of AI. My response focuses on three overlapping projects needed to more fully understand racial bias in the construction of AI and its representations in pop culture: (1) unpacking the intersections of gender and other variables with whiteness in AI’s construction, marketing, and intended functions; (2) observing the many different ways in which whiteness is scripted, and (3) noting how white racial framing exceeds white casting and thus cannot be undone by more diverse and inclusive hiring (or engineering). Our techno-utopian fantasies, I conclude, are morally suspect in ways that go beneath and beyond the white plastic covering on robotic bodies.