Consider this: In The Climb, a popular virtual reality game, any user can virtually scale skyscrapers and majestic cliffs simply by turning their head and gripping a trigger any user, that is, except one with a muscular, skeletal or neurological disorder that makes even those movements .
Orestis Papakyriakopoulos and Arwa Michelle Mboya, article co-authors, performed a socio-computational interrogation of the google search by image algorithm, a main component of the google search engine. By drawing from Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction, they treated the algorithm as a subject that was shaped (trained) by a specific culture and hence produces and reproduces the conditions of its creation. In this way, the algorithm functioned as a window for understanding the attitudes of its designers, owners, and the ones existing in the dataset it was trained on.
The co-authors learned from the algorithm by presenting it with more than 40 thousands faces of all ages and more than four races (prompts) and collecting and analyzing the assigned labels (responses) with the appropriate statistical tools. In this way, the co-authors uncovered a small portion of the algorithm’s beliefs, values, knowledge and skills, and used its visual understanding of humans and their appeara