Presenters are listed in alphabetical order.
Uncovering the Politics behind Adobe Stock
Today, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a major human rights issue. The infrastructure and ecosystems behind the design process of AI platforms are shaping our citizenry and classrooms. They are developed almost exclusively by a handful of technology companies and in a small set of elite university laboratories, spaces that, in the West, tend to be extremely white, affluent, technically oriented, and male. This bias in the way AI is developed affects how AI companies work, what products get built, whom they are designed to serve, and who benefits from their development. This paper aims to analyze the ethics and politics behind the design process of Adobe Stock and Adobe’s more recent AI and machine learning technology, Adobe Sensei. The paper shows that the whole endeavor of collecting images, categorizing them, and labeling them is itself a form of politics, filled with questions about who gets to decide what images mean and what kinds of social and political work those representations perform.