Skip to 0 minutes and 6 seconds Chatbots are big business. Global brands are increasingly using them for digital marketing and to sell products. So why do we need to design feminist chatbots? I care about feminist chatbots because they are our day to day interaction with artificial intelligence, and if we are engaging with chatbots that have bias in their design or gender stereotypes, then those stereotypes become influential. Chatbots, like any other artificially intelligent system, can reinforce negative biases and stereotypes, or they can promote discriminatory behaviour if their designers don’t explicitly and consciously work to avoid this.
Skip to 0 minutes and 47 seconds By applying ideas from feminism to technology development, we can help people create products and services that promote equality and positive social change rather than making social problems like inequality or prejudice worse. So much of pre-existing bias in society can already be amplified in machine learning systems. So it’s important to think about what kind of conversational bias gets amplified more and more in conversational automation systems like chatbots. We’ve designed this course to help you become an ethically conscious and responsible chatbot designer and to create your own chatbot that has a really beneficial impact on its users and on society.
Skip to 1 minute and 27 seconds You’ll be learning from me and Alex Fefegha, the Head of Making at Comuzi Labs, and you’ll meet some other really interesting contributors along the way. By the end of the course, you’ll know a lot more about chatbots and how they work, as well as how they can reinforce bias and promote discriminatory behaviours. You’ll have learned a set of feminist design tools that can help you avoid all these problems. You will also have prototyped your own chatbot. It doesn’t matter if you’re starting with no experience of coding, because we’ll walk you through the whole process step by step. So we really hope that you enjoy the course, and we can’t wait to get started on the creative journey.
