'AI Czar' Kamala Harris launches bid to protect Americans from racist artificial intelligence: VP demands proof the technology is not biased

Vice President Kamala Harris announced Wednesday an effort to protect Americans from unregulated artificial intelligence, especially on issues of race.

The vice president shared her concerns with reporters in a press call, pointing to the need to protect the rights of the American people when using any kind of AI in the federal government.

'If the Veterans Administration wants to use AI in VA hospitals to help doctors diagnose patients, they would first have to demonstrate that AI does not produce racially biased diagnoses,' she said.

To that end, Harris announced an administration rule for government agencies to verify that their use of AI would not be racist or endanger anyone's rights.

'I believe that all leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector have a moral, ethical, and societal duty to make sure that artificial intelligence is adopted and advanced in a way that protects the public from potential harm while ensuring everyone is able to enjoy its full benefit,' she said.

She also announced the administration's requirement for federal agencies to reveal the AI systems they were using and how they were using it in their jobs.

The federal government, she said, would act as a model for any company or global entity using AI to improve their productivity.

'President Biden and I intend that these domestic policies will serve as a model for global action,' she said.

Prominent universities have identified AI as problematic on issues of race, especially in healthcare systems.

'Health care algorithms that power AI may include bias against underrepresented communities and thus amplify existing racial inequality in medicine, according to a growing body of evidence,' wrote Isabella Backman of the Yale School of Medicine in December 2023.

MIT grad Joy Buolamwini launched the 'Algorithmic Justice League' to fight algorithmic bias, describing it as a 'coded gaze' that could affect issues of basic goods and services including health care and law enforcement. She urges companies to prioritize more 'inclusive coding' to make sure that the end result of AI is not racially biased.

Companies continue to struggle with racial sensitivities when using or deploying artificial intelligence, even when trying to identify or counter-program racially-charged outcomes.

Google apologized after its Gemini AI tool generated images of non-white female founding fathers, black female popes, and black and female Asian Nazi soldiers in response to user prompts. 

'It's clear that this feature missed the mark,' Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president who runs Google's search engine and other businesses wrote in response to the controversy. 'Some of the images generated are inaccurate or even offensive. We're grateful for users' feedback and are sorry the feature didn't work well.'

Critics of Google ridiculed the end result as a product of 'woke' AI. 

Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk mocked Google's AI system as proof the company surrounded it self 'insane racist, anti-civilizational programming.'

As more companies look for ways to implement artificial intelligence Harris seized the issue as part of her issue portfolio as vice president.

'I think the first part of this issue that should be articulated is AI is kind of a fancy thing,' she said during one of her first roundtable discussions of the issue. 'First of all, it's two letters. It means artificial intelligence, but ultimately what it is, is it's about machine learning.'

In November, Harris traveled to London to participate in an AI Safety Summit and delivered a speech to global leaders.

'[L]et us work together to build a future where AI creates opportunity, advances equity, fundamental freedoms and rights being protected,' she said.