A recent KAUST search of an AI imaging software tool returned an average of one percent of women when using the prompts “imagine entrepreneur,” “imagine inventor” and “imagine software engineer.” 

Yet globally women represent one in three early-stage entrepreneurs and 20 percent of computer scientists. In Saudi Arabia, 45 percent of startups are owned by women.

“Gender bias is a well-known drawback of many learning AI systems based on artificial neural networks, especially regarding women of color,” said Jurgen Schmidhuber, KAUST professor of computer science and director of the KAUST AI Initiative.

“One solution is to retrain the algorithms on appropriately selected unbiased data sets,” he said.

Although not an easy task, Schmidhuber is optimistic, especially as more Saudi women are considering a career in technology and 47 percent of graduates in KAUST’s AI academy program are women.

“That by itself may move the needle in this space: More women working in AI may help to generate new and less biased data sets as a natural by-product of their work,” he said.

“Right now, in the creative world, AI is met with either excitement or skepticism,” said Fernando Miranda, creative director at VMLY&R, the agency responsible for developing the “Dear AI” campaign.

“I believe AI is a reflection of reality — it’s what we teach it to be and our campaign reflects these biases. And while we can ask the machine to learn more, it is us that should do the teaching,” he said.

As part of the campaign, KAUST will host a hackathon in the summer, bringing together AI and machine-learning students and scientists from Saudi Arabia and the world to retrain these tools and mitigate the effects of gender bias.

Participants will review demographic dataset categories, labels used and modeling features, as well as create new datasets for training.

As the first mixed-gender university in the Kingdom, KAUST is committed to encouraging more women, particularly in science, technology and entrepreneurship.

The university maintains a female student population of 39 percent — higher than the global average of women in STEM programs. It also has a mandate to train young entrepreneurs and scientists from Saudi Arabia.

KAUST’s entrepreneurship programs have trained more than 24,000 people with an average female participation rate of 51 percent and its MENA-based startup accelerator program, TAQADAM, now in its sixth year, has a female founder rate of 49 percent.

“Nine out of ten women here view starting businesses as favorable,” said Hattan Ahmed, director of the KAUST Entrepreneurship Center.

“This is reflected in our programs where women from across the country represent over 50 percent of those trained. Not only are the AI results biased and out of touch at a global level, but they also don’t reflect us locally, and we want to change that,” he said.