markets itself to Christians who want to stop viewing pornography. Its software takes screenshots of a user’s screen activity, uses A.I. to scan it for pornographic imagery, and then sends regular reports to the user and a designated “ally” who has agreed to hold him accountable. The company’s name comes from aEveryone wants technology to reflect their own worldview, and religious conservatives are no exception.
When the reader meets David, the rabbinical school dropout is being interviewed by an Austin startup to train its customer service chatbots to avoid anti-Semitic language. Those chatbots had been programed to “learn” from humans, but along the way they were picking up subtle conspiracy language from angry, obsessive customers. David’s job is to “sort out the good Jewish-stuff from the bad Jewish-stuff,” as he puts it.
Human preferences and values are baked into every tool we create, including A.I. But it’s one thing to acknowledge the stubbornness of bias and another thing to add it on purpose. Decen.cy considers its own team’s values to be mainstream and anodyne. Mark and David are much more comfortable debating whether yoga is culturally appropriative than programming a bot to recommend prayer in response to a mental health crisis.
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