Explain AI bias like you're five? How about with Santa?

A parody of the "The Night Before Christmas" poem ("A Visit from St. Nicholas" by Clement Clarke Moore) where Santa's elves decide to use machine learning to automate the naughty/nice list and discover an important lesson about historical data and AI bias.

For (a lot!) more of me talking about issues in tech and AI ethics, check out my TikTok and Instagram @professorcasey.

For a text-only version of this poem: https://cfiesler.medium.com/twas-the-ai-bias-before-christmas-3255cd3acf77

The end of the video also includes a (very very brief!) discussion of AI bias. Here are some additional resources cited in the video:
- "Coded Bias" documentary (2020) directed by Shalini Kantayya, currently available on Netflix
- Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble (2018)
- More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech by Meredith Broussard (2023)
- Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks (2018)
- Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruja Benjamin (2019)
- Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini (2023)
- Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil (2016)
- "The next normal: Algorithms will take over college, from admissions to advising" by Shea Swauger (The Washington Post, 11/12/21)
- "A biased medical algorithm favored white people for health-care programs" by Charlotte Jee (MIT Technology Review, 10/25/19)

Image Credit: OpenAI's DALL-E 3 via ChatGPT-4, and countless uncompensated and uncredited artists whose work contributed to the model.