Paper ID: 2403.14658

Identifying Potential Inlets of Man in the Artificial Intelligence Development Process

Deja Workman, Christopher L. Dancy

In this paper we hope to identify how the typical or standard artificial intelligence development process encourages or facilitates the creation of racialized technologies. We begin by understanding Sylvia Wynter's definition of the biocentric Man genre and its exclusion of Blackness from humanness. We follow this with outlining what we consider to be the typical steps for developing an AI-based technology, which we have broken down into 6 stages: identifying a problem, development process and management tool selection, dataset development and data processing, model development, deployment and risk assessment, and integration and monitoring. The goal of this paper is to better understand how Wynter's biocentric Man is being represented and reinforced by the technologies we are producing in the AI lifecycle and by the lifecycle itself; we hope to identify ways in which the distinction of Blackness from the "ideal" human leads to perpetual punishment at the hands of these technologies. By deconstructing this development process, we can potentially identify ways in which humans in general have not been prioritized and how those affects are disproportionately affecting marginalized people. We hope to offer solutions that will encourage changes in the AI development cycle.

Submitted: Feb 27, 2024