The Whiteness of AI

RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access
The Whiteness of AI
Stephen Cave1&Kanta Dihal1
Received: 3 January 2020 / Accepted: 28 June 2020/
#The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
This paper focuses on the fact that AI is predominantly portrayed as white —in colour,
ethnicity, or both. We first illustrate the prevalent Whiteness of real and imagined
intelligent machines in four categories: humanoid robots, chatbots and virtual assis-tants, stock images of AI, and portrayals of AI in film and television. We then offerthree interpretations of the Whiteness of AI, drawing on critical race theory, particularlythe idea of the White racial frame. First, we examine the extent to which this Whitenessmight simply reflect the predominantly White milieus from which these artefacts arise.Second, we argue that to imagine machines that are intelligent, professional, orpowerful is to imagine White machines because the White racial frame ascribes these
attributes predominantly to White people. Third, we argue that AI racialised as White
allows for a full erasure of people of colour from the White utopian imaginary. Finally,we examine potential consequences of the racialisation of AI, arguing it could exacer-bate bias and misdirect concern.
Keywords Artificial intelligence .Robots .Critical race studies .Racialisation .
Anthropomorphism .Whiteness
Overall, I construe race, racialization, and racial identities as on-going sets of
political relations that require, through constant perpetuation via institutions,discourses, practices, desires, infrastructures, languages, technologies, sciences,economies, dreams, and cultural artefacts, the barring of nonwhite subjects from
the category of the human as it is performed in the modern west.
Alexander G. Weheliye (Weheliye 2014 ,2 )
Technology as an abstract concept functions as a white mythology.
Joel Dinerstein (Dinerstein 2006, 570)Philosophy & Technology
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00415-6
\*Stephen Cave
sjc53@cam.ac.uk
1Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
1 Introduction
It is a truth little acknowledged that a machine in possession of intelligence must be
white. Typing terms like “robot”or“artificial intelligence ”into a search engine will
yield a preponderance of stock images of white plastic humanoids. Perhaps morenotable still, these machines are not only white in colour, but the more human they
are made to look, the more their features are made ethnically White.
1In this paper, we
problematize the often unnoticed and unremarked-upon fact that intelligent machinesare predominantly conceived and portrayed as White. We argue that this Whitenessboth illuminates particularities of what (Anglophone Western) society hopes for andfears from these machines, and situates these affects within long-standing ideologicalstructures that relate race and technology.
Race and technology are two of the most powerful and important categories for
understanding the world as it has developed since at least the early modern period. Yet,
as a number of scholars have noted, their profound entanglement remains understudied
(Sinclair 2004 ; de la Peña 2010 ). There are a number of possible reasons for this —and,
as Bruce Sinclair writes, “racial prejudice dominates all of them ”(Sinclair 2004 ,1 ) .
They include the lack of first- or secondhand accounts of the role of people of colour inthe development and use of technology; persistent stereotypes about technology as theprovince and product of one particular racial group —White people; and the persistent
tendency of members of that group, who dominate the academy in the US and Europe,to refuse to see themselves as racialised or race as a matter of concern at all.
This lack of scholarly attention is surprising because, as Michael Adas elucidated in
1989, the idea of technological superiority was essential to the logic of colonialism. Notonly was superior weaponry and transportation (etc.) necessary for large-scale conquestand control of foreign territory, it was also part of its justification: proof that WhiteEuropeans were an advanced civilisation with a right to rule over others (Adas 1989 ).
Fortunately, this lack of attention is increasingly being remedied, and the relationshipbetween race and technology is beginning to garner the kind of attention that has sincethe 1970s been given to gender and technology, following the pioneering work of
Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, and Evelyn Fox Keller (Haraway 1991 ;H a r d i n g
1986 ;K e l l e r 1985 ). This includes attention to this century ’s ubiquitous digital technol-
ogies. In 2006, Lisa Nakamura asked, “How do we make cyberculture studies a field
that as a matter of course employs critical race theory and theories of cultural
difference …?”(Nakamura 2006 , 35). Since then, a number of significant works have
attempted to do just that, including Safiya Noble ’sAlgorithms of Oppression and Ruha
Benjamin ’sRace After Technology (Noble 2018 ; Benjamin 2019 ).
This paper aims to contribute to this body of literature on race and technology by
examining how the ideology of race shapes conceptions and portrayals of artificial
intelligence (AI). Our approach is grounded in the philosophy of race and critical racetheory, particularly the Black feminist theories of bell hooks, Sylvia Wynter andAlexander G. Weheliye (hooks 1992 1997 ; Wynter 2003 ; Weheliye 2014 ), and work
1Following the increasingly common usage of the capitalised form “Black ”to denote the ethnicity and
“black”the colour, we use “White ”to refer to the ethnicity and “white”the colour. While not yet the norm, as
can be seen in our quotations of critics who do not employ this distinction, this usage will make our discussion
clearer.S. Cave, K. Dihal
in Whiteness studies, including that of Richard Dyer, Joe R. Feagin, and Ruth
Frankenberg (Dyer 1997 ; Feagin 2013 ; Frankenberg 1997a ). In 2006, Feagin coined
the term “white racial frame ”to describe those aspects of the Anglophone Western
worldview that perpetuate a racialised hierarchy of power and privilege (Feagin 2006 ).
In his words, “the white racial frame includes a broad and persisting set of racial
stereotypes, prejudices, ideologies, interlinked interpretations and narratives, and visual
images ”(Feagin 2013 , xi). Although it reached its peak in the age of colonial
expansion, this framing persists: “Today, as whites move through their lives, they
frequently combine racial stereotypes and biases (a beliefs aspect), racial metaphorsand concepts (a deeper cogn itive aspect), racialised ima ges (the visual aspect),
racialised emotions (feelings), interpretive racial narratives, and inclinations to discrim-inate within a broad racial framing ”(Feagin 2013 , 91). In essence, this paper examines
how representations of AI reflect this White racial frame.
One of the main aims of critical race theory in general, and Whiteness
studies in particular, is to draw attention to the operation of Whiteness in
Western culture. The power of Whiteness ’s signs and symbols lies to a large
extent in their going unnoticed and unquestioned, concealed by the myth ofcolour-blindness. As scholars such as Jessie Daniels and Safiya Noble havenoted, this myth of colour-blindness is pa rticularly prevalent in Silicon Valley
and surrounding tech culture, where it serves to inhibit serious interrogation ofracial framing (Daniels 2013 ,2015 ; Noble 2018 ). Hence the first step for such
an interrogation is, in Richard Dyer ’st e r m ,t o “make strange ”this Whiteness,
de-normalising and drawing attention to it (Dyer 1997 , 10). As Steve Garner
puts it, the reason “for deploying whiteness as a lens is that it strips a
normative privileged identity of its cloak of invisibility ”(Garner 2007 ,5 ) .T h i s
is our primary intention in examining intelligent machines through the Whiteracial frame.
In the next section of this paper, we first lay out current evidence for the assertion
that conceptions and portrayals of AI —both embodied as robots and disembodied —are
racialised, then evidence that such machines are predominantly racialised as White. In
the third section of the paper, we offer our readings of this Whiteness. Our methods are
qualitative. As de la Peña writes: “Studying whiteness means working with evidence
more interpretive than tangible; it requires imaginative analyses of language andsatisfaction with identifying possible motivations of subjects, rather than definitivetrajectories of innovation, production, and consumption ”( d el aP e ñ a 2010 ,9 2 6 ) .W e
offer three interpretations of the Whiteness of AI. First, the normalisation of Whitenessin the Anglophone West can go some way to explaining why that sphere ’sp r o d u c t s ,
including representations of AI, are White. But we argue that this argument alone is
insufficient. Second, we argue that to imagine an intelligent (autonomous, agential,
powerful) machine is to imagine a White machine because the White racial frameascribes these attributes predominantly to White people. Thirdly, we argue that AIracialised as White allows for a full erasure of people of colour from the White utopianimaginary. Such machines are conceived as tools that will replace “dirty, dull, or
dangerous ”tasks (Murphy 2000 , 16), including replacing human interactions that are
considered metaphorically dirty: White robot servants will allow the White master tolive a life of ease unsullied by interaction with people of other races.The Whiteness of AI
2S e e i n gt h eW h i t e n e s so fA I
Our concern in this paper is with the racialisation (as White) of both real and imagined
machines that are implied or claimed to be intelligent. By racialisation, we mean theascription of characteristics that are used to identify and delineate races in a given racialframe, which in this case is the Anglophone West. Feagan notes:
Among the most important ingredients of this frame are: (1) the recurring use of
certain physical characteristics, such as skin colour and facial features, to differ-entiate social groups; (2) the constant linking of physical characteristics tocultural characteristics; and (3) the regular use of physical and linked culturaldistinctions to differentiate socially “superior ”and“inferior ”groups in a social
hierarchy (Feagin 2013 ,4 1 ) .
It is worth noting that “physical characteristics ”need not only refer to those that are
visible: voice and accent are also used as markers for social categorisation. Similarly,the category “cultural characteristics ”is also used expansively and can include markers
such as dialect, mannerisms, and dress codes, as well as mental and moral qualities,such as diligence, industriousness, reliability, trustworthiness, inventiveness, and intel-lectual ability. Indeed, these mental and moral qualities have always been an essentialpart of the racial frame, as it is largely on the basis of these that claims of superiority orinferiority have been made.
2.1 Machines Can Be Racialised
That machines can be racialised, in the sense that they can be given attributes that
enable their identification with human racial categories, has been empiricallydemonstrated. For example, in one study, Christoph Bartneck and colleagues tookpictures of the humanoid Nao robot and adjusted the colouration to match the skin toneof stock images of White and Black people (Bartneck et al. 2018 ). They then asked
participants to define the race of the robot with several options including “does not
apply ”. A minority —ranging across the experiments from 7 to 20% —chose the “does
not apply ”option, while a majority —ranging from 53 to 70% —identified the robots as
belonging to the race from which their colouration derived. They concluded “Partici-
pants were able to easily and confidently identify the race of robots according to theirracialization [...] Thus, there is also a clear sense in which these robots –and by
extension other humanoid robots –do have race ”(Bartneck et al. 2018 ,2 0 1 ) .
This should not be surprising. Many machines are anthropomorphised —that is,
made to be human-like to some degree —in order to facilitate human-machine interac-
tion. This might involve obvious physical features (a head on top, two eyes, a mouth,four limbs, bipedalism, etc.), but it can also include invisible features such as a human-like voice, or human-like interactions, such as politeness or humour. Given theprevalence of racial framing, in most contexts, to be human-like means to have race.Consequently, as Liao and He point out in their discussion of the racialisation ofpsychotherapeutic chatbots, “racial identity is an integral part of anthropomorphized
agents ”(Liao and He 2020 , 2). They go on to explore a number of racial cues for virtual
agents, including visual cues such as skin colour, but also cultural signifiers such asS. Cave, K. Dihal
names (e.g. for male names, Jake as White, Darnell as Black, and Antonio as Hispanic).
Similarly, “even text-based conversational exchanges ”—that is, those with no visual
component at all —“perform a racial or ethnic identity ”through the interlocutors ’
choice of dialect, etc. (Marino 2014 ,3 ) .
Given the sociopolitical importance of the racial frame in structuring people ’s
interactions, if machines are really being racialised, then we would expect this
to have an impact on how people interact with these machines. Numerous
studies show just this. For example, Liao and He found that a person ’s
“perceived interpersonal closeness ”with a virtual agent is higher when the
virtual agent has the same racial identity as that person (Liao and He 2020 ,
2). Other studies reflect the extent to which racism —prejudicial treatment on
the basis of race —is intrinsic to racial framing.
As detailed in their paper “Robots Racialized in the Likeness of Marginalized Social
Identities are Subject to Greater Dehumanization than Those Racialized as White ”,
Strait et al. analysed free-form online responses to three videos, each depicting a
female-gendered android with a different racial identity: Black, White, and East Asian.Their aim was to assess whether the same kind of marginalising and dehumanisingcommentary that is applied to real people of colour would be applied to these robots.They found that the valence of the commentary was significantly more negativetowards the Black robot than towards the White or Asian ones and that both the Asianand Black robots were subject to over twice as many dehumanising comments as theWhite robot (Strait et al. 2018 ).
Two recent studies have further examined the transfer of bias to machines
using the “shooter bias ”paradigm. This paradigm was first described in the
2002 paper “The Police Officer ’s Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate
Potentially Threatening Individuals ”(Correll et al. 2002 ). It used a simple video
game featuring images of (real) Black and White male targets, each holdingeither a gun or a nonthreatening object. P articipants were instructed to shoot
only armed targets. A clear racial bias was identified: “participants fired on an
armed target more quickly when he was African American than when he was
White, and decided not to shoot an unarmed target more quickly when he was
White than when he was African American ”(Correll et al. 2002 , 1325). Studies
by Bartneck et al. and Addison et al. used the same methodology to examinewhether this “shooter bias ”would be transferred to racialised robots (Bartneck
et al. 2018 ;A d d i s o ne ta l . 2019 ). They found that “people showed a similar
shooter bias toward robots racialized as Black relative to White in a similarfashion as they showed toward Black vs. White humans, no matter their ownrace”(Addison et al. 2019 , 493).
2.2 Whiteness as the Norm for Intelligent Machines
The previous section shows that research has empirically demonstrated that machines
can be racialised and that this racialisation includes transfer of the attendant biasesfound in the human world. In this subsection, we will survey evidence for the extent towhich AI systems —machines purported to be intelligent —are predominantly racialised
as White. We will look briefly at four categories: real humanoid robots, virtual personal
assistants, stock images of AI, and portrayals of AI in film and television.The Whiteness of AI
2.2.1 The Whiteness of Humanoid Robots
A number of commentators have remarked on the preponderant Whiteness of human-
oid robots. In their proposed “code of ethics ”for human-robot interaction Riek and
Howard note the “lack of diversity in robot morphology and behavior ”:
In terms of race, with precious few exceptions, such as Hanson ’s Bina48, the vast
majority of android and gynoid robots are Asian or Caucasian in their features forno discernible reason. Furthermore, most of these robots tend to have a euro-centric design with regards to their appearance, behavior, and voice. (Riek andHoward 2014 ,4 )
Human-computer interaction researchers Christoph Bartneck and colleagues, who
conducted some of the studies cited above, have also noted that robots are usually
racialised as White: “most of the main research platforms for social robotics, including
Nao, Pepper, and PR2, are stylized with white materials and are presumably White ”
(Bartneck et al. 2018 , 202). Finally, media studies and literary scholar Jennifer Rhee
notes the “normalization and universalization of whiteness ”as expressed both in earlier
robotics research and in robot toys: “Kismet, with its blue eyes, light brown eyebrows,
and pink ears, also ‘normalizes whiteness ’, as do other robot companions, such as the
blonde-haired, blue-eyed Cindy Smart Doll and the similarly blonde-haired, blue-eyedMy Friend Cayla. ”(Rhee 2018 ,1 0 5 ) .
Although robots such as Nao and Pepper have enjoyed commercial success, neither
has received quite the attention garnered by Sophia from Hanson Robotics. Thismachine consists foremost of a White humanoid head, sometimes also with an uppertorso (see Fig. 1). It has not only given numerous high-profile television interviews but
also received political honours, including in 2017 receiving citizenship of Saudi Arabiaand becoming an “Innovation Champion ”for the United Nations Development Pro-
gramme (Weller 2017 ;U N D P 2017 ).
2.2.2 The Whiteness of Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
Though conversational agents do not exhibit any visual racial cues, they are racialised
by means of sociolinguistic markers (Sweeney 2016 ; Villa-Nicholas and Sweeney
2019 ). Discussing ELIZA, an influential natural language processing program created
by Joseph Weizenbaum at the MIT AI Laboratory in 1966, Mark Marino writes: “If
ELIZA presented a bot that tried to imitate language, it was performing standard whitemiddle-class English, without a specific identifying cultural inflection... language with-
out culture, disembodied, hegemonic, and, in a word, white ”(Marino 2014 ,5 ) .S i n c e
then, natural language processing has entered the mainstream, with “virtual assistants ”
existing in many people ’s pockets, handbags, or homes through devices such as
smartphones. Indeed, this is one of the most common ways in which people interactwith technology that could be labelled “AI”. These tools present their designers with
many decisions about socio-cultural positioning. Ruha Benjamin recalls this anecdote:
A former Apple employee who noted that he was “not Black or Hispanic ”
described his experience on a team that was developing speech recognition forS. Cave, K. Dihal
Siri, the virtual assistant program. As they worked on different English dialects
—Australian, Singaporean and Indian English —he asked his boss: “What about
African American English? ”To this his boss responded: “Well, Apple products
are for the premium market. ”(Benjamin 2019 ,2 8 )
As a further example, she describes a Black computer scientist who chose a White
voice for his app rather than a Black one, so as not to “create friction ”(Benjamin 2019 ,
28–29). So while some designers might be unconsciously racialising their products as
White, others are doing so in full awareness of this choice.
2.2.3 The Whiteness of Stock Images of AI
As anyone working in the field will know, stock images of AI, at least when
anthropomorphised, are overwhelmingly white and arguably overwhelmingly White.The more realistically humanoid these machines become, the more Caucasian in theirfeatures. Such images are used to illustrate not only generalist newspaper articles andcorporate slideshows but also specialist and technical works, and even works of acritical nature, such as Harry Collins ’sArtifictional Intelligence (Polity, 2018) and
Anthony Elliott ’sThe Culture of AI (Routledge, 2018) (Fig. 2).
The prevalence of such images is reflected in the results of search engines. Such
searches are a useful indicator of how a subject is portrayed at a given time, for two
reasons. First, search engines are very widely used (approximately 3.5 billion searchesare made on Google every day, or 40 thousand per second
2) and can therefore be
considered a highly influential source of information and perceptions. Second, thenature of such search engines means that they are not only promoting certain ideas andperceptions but also reflecting their existing prevalence. While the exact nature of
2https://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/ accessed 30 December 2019.
Fig. 1 Sophia. Hanson Robotics, April 2020The Whiteness of AI
Google ’s search, ranking, and result presentation algorithms is proprietary, we know
that they evaluate (crudely put) influence and popularity —for example, in terms of how
many other sites link to a given website. So the fact that certain images are shown when
someone searches for a relevant term means not only that those images are being thuspromoted by some of the most powerful organs of content mediation in existence todaybut also that these images are already widespread and used on other influentialwebsites, as that is what underlies their promotion by the search engines.
Consequently, search results are increasingly examined by scholars, including in the
study of racial bias. For example, in her 2018 book Algorithms of Oppression: How
Search Engines Reinforce Racism , Safiya U. Noble identifies many ways in which such
sites reflect and exacerbate prejudice, such as the search results for “Latinas ”that
feature mostly porn (Noble 2018 , 75, 155) or the White men who come up when
searching for images of professions such as “construction worker ”,“doctor ”,o r
“scientist ”(Noble 2018 ,8 2–83).
In order to get an indication of the prevalence of these racialised machines on the
internet, we conducted two image searches on Google (the most widely used searchengine) using the anonymous Tor browser to ensure results were not influenced by ourpersonal search histories and locations. We first searched on the term “artificial
intelligence ”: the top results are in Fig. 3. Some of these results are too abstract,
featuring stylised brains and circuits, for example, to be considered racialised. How-ever, among the results showing humanoid figures, racialisation as White predomi-nates. First, two pictures show actual human hands, and both are White. Second,a further two pictures show humanoid robots, and both are White and could thus beread as White, as Bartneck et al. suggest (Bartneck et al. 2018 , 202). Therefore, we
might say that inasmuch as the machines are racialised, they are racialised as White.
In order to focus more on representations of embodied, anthropomorphic AI, we also
searched for “artificial intelligence robot ”: the top results are in Fig. 4.A si sc l e a r ,t h i s
Fig. 2 Covers of Collins 2018, Polity, and Elliott 2018, RoutledgeS. Cave, K. Dihal
search produces an even greater preponderance of images that are either white in colour
or racialised as White or both.
2.2.4 The Whiteness of AI in Film and Television
These contemporary stock images distil the visualisations of intelligent machines in
Western popular culture as it has developed over decades. In science fiction from thenineteenth century onwards, AI is predominantly imagined as White. For example, theTerminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), RoboCop (Peter Weller and Joel Kinnaman), allof the “replicants ”in the Blade Runner franchise (e.g. Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and
Mackenzie Davis), Sonny in I, Robot (Alan Tudyk), Ava in Ex Machina (Alicia
Fig. 3 Tor browser Google image search result for “artificial intelligence ”, 13 April 2020
Fig. 4 Tor browser Google image search result for “artificial intelligence robot ”, 13 April 2020The Whiteness of AI
Vikander) (Fig. 5), and Maria in Metropolis (Brigitte Helm) are all played by White
actors and are visibly White on screen. Androids made of metal or plastic are alsousually given White facial features, such as the robots in the 2007 film I, Robot .
Even disembodied AI is imagined as White: HAL-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey
and Samantha in Her are voiced by White actors. All of these AIs come from
Hollywood films; they have been produced in a country in which 18% of the popula-
tion is Hispanic, but in which only one fictional robot has that background: Bender
Rodríguez in the animated TV series Futurama , who is canonically constructed in
Mexico —but who is voiced by the White voice actor John DiMaggio. Only very recent
TV shows with a large cast of androids, such as Westworld and Humans , have
attempted to address this with AI characters evincing a mix of skin tones and ethnic-ities. This preponderance of intelligent machines racialised as White led Dyer to posit“the android as a definition of whiteness ”(Dyer 1997 ,2 1 3 ) .
3 Understanding the Whiteness of AI
We offer three interpretations of the racialisation of intelligent machines as White: the
Whiteness of their creators perpetuating itself; the Whiteness of the attributes ascribedto AI; and the extent to which AI permits the erasure of people of colour from theWhite utopia.
3.1 Whiteness Reproducing Whiteness
In European and North American societies, Whiteness is normalised to an extent that
renders it largely invisible. As Toby Ganley puts it in his survey of Whiteness studies,“the monopoly that whiteness has over the norm ”is one of the field ’s two unifying
insights —the other being that it confers power and privilege (Ganley 2003 , 12).
Richard Dyer describes this as the view that “other people are raced, we are just
people ”(Dyer 1997 , 1). This normalisation means that Whiteness is not perceived by
majority populations as a distinct colour, but rather as an absence of colour —colour
Fig. 5 Alicia Vikander as Ava in Ex Machina . Source: YoutubeS. Cave, K. Dihal
both in the literal sense and in the sense of race. Consequently, the Whiteness of AI
could be considered simply a default. It does not appear as a feature, but is transparent,l i k et h ea i rw eb r e a t h e :t h e “unmarked marker ”, as Ruth Frankenberg calls it
(Frankenberg 1997b , 1). The majority of White viewers are unlikely to see human-
like machines as racialised at all, but simply as conforming to their idea of what“human-like ”means.
For non-White people, on the other hand, Whiteness is never invisible in this
manner, as bell hooks reminds us (hooks 1992 1997 ). So-called colour-blindness, an
attitude of not seeing race, and of presuming that people in contemporary society are nolonger disadvantaged on the basis of race, is itself a narrative that perpetuates Whitehegemony: “communities of color frequently see and name whiteness clearly and
critically, in periods when white folks have asserted their own ‘color blindness ’”
(Frankenberg 1997b , 4). Noble argues that “central to these ‘colorblind ’ideologies is
a focus on the inappropriateness of ‘seeing race ’”—a view that she argues is dominant
among Silicon Valley technologists, who “revel in their embrace of colorblindness as if
it is an asset and not a proven liability ”(Noble 2018 , 168). Such colour-blindness is a
liability because it obscures the normalisation of Whiteness and marginalisation ofother racialised groups —and the real world effects this has, such as facial recognition
technologies not distinguishing Black or East Asian faces (Buolamwini and Gebru2018 ).
Given the normalisation of Whiteness, for some designers, to make a human-like
machine will unthinkingly mean to make a White machine. As Dyer puts it: “white
people create the dominant images of the world and don ’t quite see that they thus create
the dominant images of the world in their own image ”(Dyer 1997 , 9). But this alone is
not a satisfactory explanation of the Whiteness of AI, as not all entities —more
specifically, not all intelligent, humanoid entities —imagined by predominantly White
industries are portrayed as White. For example, Western science fiction has a longtradition of White authors racialising extraterrestrials as non-White. In the late nine-teenth century, for instance, the real-world fear of the “Yellow Peril ”was metaphori-
cally addressed in science fiction by racialising extraterrestrial invaders as East Asian.
The Flash Gordon franchise gained its lead villain in a 1934 comic, which introduced
the tyrannical emperor of the planet Mongo —the Orientalised alien Ming the
Merciless.
Such is the villain in Flash Gordon - a trident bearded, slanty eyed, shiny doomed
[sic], pointy nailed, arching eyebrowed, exotically garbed Oriental named Ming,who personifies unadulterated evil. A heavy like Ming is not contrived in a comicstrip writer ’s imagination during a coffee break, but rather is the product of
perhaps the richest and longest tradition of all of Hollywood ethnic stereotypes.
(Barshay 1974 ,2 4–26)
Dyer points out that Blade Runner similarly deliberately uses East Asian characters in
order to offset the whiteness of its protagonists, including the White androids: “the
yellow human background emphasises the chief protagonists ’whiteness. The whitest
of hue are the replicants ”(Dyer 1997 , 214). Racial stereotyping of aliens is not a
phenomenon limited to past centuries. The Star Wars prequel trilogy (Lucas 1999;
2002; 2005) has been criticised for the “transparent racism ”in its depiction of the alienThe Whiteness of AI
Jar Jar Binks as a West Indian caricature (Lavender 2011 , 193) reminiscent of blackface
minstrelsy (Williams 1999 ), and of the slave trader Watto, an antisemitic Jewish
caricature with a large nose, skullcap, Yiddish accent, and obsession with money(Freedman 2019 ).
This racialisation of aliens in SF suggests that the racialisation of artificial intelli-
gence is a choice. The White racial frame as perpetuated by the White creators of these
works portrays dangerous invaders from another planet as East Asian and bumbling
alien petty-criminals as Afro-Caribbean. Therefore, the fact that it portrays AI asoverwhelmingly White requires further explanation. In the following sections, we offertwo.
3.2 AI and the Attributes of WhitenessWhile Whiteness functions in part through its invisibility in mainstream discourse, this
does not mean it has no distinguishable features of its own. Indeed, the White racial
frame has a long history of ascribing certain attributes to Whites and disputing them inothers: these are the very claims that have been used to justify colonialism, segregation,and other modes of oppression. We argue that AI is predominantly racialised as Whitebecause it is deemed to possess attributes that this frame imputes to White people. Weexamine these attributes under three key headings: intelligence, professionalism, andpower.
First, the primary attribute being projected onto these machines is, as the term “AI”
suggests, intelligence. Throughout the history of Western thought, but in particular
since the seventeenth century in Europe and the territories it colonised, intelligence hasbeen associated with some humans more than others (Carson 2006 ). The idea that some
races were more mentally able than others was crucial to the legitimation of theadvancing colonial project. Those deemed less intelligent —in the words of Rudyard
Kipling, “Half-devil and half-child ”—were judged unqualified to rule themselves and
their lands. It was therefore legitimate —even a duty, “the white man ’sb u r d e n ”as
Kipling put it —to destroy their cultures and take their territories (Kipling 1899 ).
Through the nineteenth century, strenuous efforts were made to empirically demon-
strate and measure this intellectual difference, culminating in the development of the IQtest (Gould 1981 ). Although explicit associations between racial groups and intelli-
gence declined after the Second World War, (a) they continue to be made in right-wingcircles (Saini 2019 ) and (b) implicit or unconscious associations between race and
intelligence persist widely (see, for example, van den Bergh et al. 2010 ; Okeke et al.
2009 ). Given the White racial frame has for centuries promoted the association of
intelligence with the White, European race, it is to be expected that when this culture is
asked to imagine an intelligent machine, it imagines a White machine.
A crucial aspect of the idea of intelligence is generality. Intelligence is often defined
as a“general mental capability ”(Gottfredson 1997 ), and in AI, the concept of “artificial
general intelligence ”—a system with the kind of flexible mental capabilities humans
have—is often considered to be the original and primary goal of the field (Crevier
1993 ). But in the White racial frame, not all humans are considered to have this
attribute to the same degree. As Weheliye puts it, using Sylvia Wynter ’si d e ao f “the
Man”—the Enlightenment, Western, White male subject, “In the context of the secular
human, black subjects, along with indigenous populations, the colonised, the insane,S. Cave, K. Dihal
the poor, the disabled, and so on serve as limit cases by which Man can demarcate
himself as the universal human ”(Weheliye 2014 , 24). According to the White racial
frame, it is the rational, scientific thought of the White Westerner that lays claim touniversal validity —or, we might say, true generality. Other races, by contrast, are
framed as particular and subjective, constrained by the limits of their non-ideal bodiesand cultures to think thoughts that are partial and parochial. To imagine a truly
intelligent machine, one with general intelligence is therefore to imagine a White
machine.
Second, much of the current discourse around AI focuses on how it is, or will soon
be, capable of professional work. This is frequently claimed to be what makes the
present wave of automation different from previous waves, in which machines becamecapable of supplanting manual and semi-skilled labour (Ford 2015 ). Professional
work—law, medicine, business, and so forth —is at the upper end of pay and status
scales. White Europeans and North Americans have historically not considered all
humans equally fit for such roles and have kept them closed to people who lacked the
requisite connections, wealth, or other in-group identifiers. Universities, the gatewaysto the professions, have long histories of excluding people of colour from their ranks(Burrow 2008 ,1 0 7 ) .
The historic exclusion of anyone other than White men shapes to this day what
mainstream White culture imagines when imagining someone fulfilling such roles.Safiya Noble shows that it took years of criticism before search engines adjusted theiralgorithms so that searching for “engineer ”or“doctor ”stopped exclusively returning
images of White men (Noble 2018 ). But the underlying bias, on which the algorithms
fed, remains. To imagine a machine in a white-collar job is therefore to imagine a Whitemachine.
Third, hierarchies of intelligence and of professional status are of course also
hierarchies of power. Consequently, power relations are implicit in the previous twocategories. However, it is worth also considering power separately, because powerstruggles between AI and humans are such a common narrative trope. Alongside thenarrative that robots will make humans redundant, an equally well-known narrative is
that they will rise up and conquer us altogether (Cave and Dihal 2019 ). These are both
narratives about machines becoming superior to humans: stories in which they becomebetter at every task, leaving humans with nothing to do, from E.M. Forster ’s1909 short
story ‘The Machine Stops ’to the Oscar-winning film WALL-E , or in which they outwit
and subjugate those who built them, as in the Terminator film franchise or the film Ex
Machina (Forster 1909 ; Stanton 2008 ; Cameron 1984 ;G a r l a n d 2015 ). When White
people imagine being overtaken by superior beings, those beings do not resemble thoseraces they have framed as inferior. It is unimaginable to a White audience that they will
be surpassed by machines that are Black. Rather, it is by superlatives of themselves:
hyper-masculine White men like Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, or hyper-feminine White women like Alicia Vikander as Ava in Ex Machina .
This is why even narratives of an AI uprising that are clearly modelled on stories of
slave rebellions depict the rebelling AIs as White —for example, in Blade Runner
(Dihal 2020 ). The implication of this racialisation is that these machines might genu-
inely be superior, or are at least worthy adversaries. The use of White bodybuilderssuch as Arnold Schwarzenegger to play the evil robots suggests this. As Dyer points
out, Schwarzenegger ’s physique suggests “the body made possible by [...] naturalThe Whiteness of AI
mental superiority. The point after all is that it is built, a product of the application of
thought and planning, an achievement ”(Dyer 1997 , 164). Consequently, for a White
technologist or author, to imagine a superior anthropomorphic machine is to imagine aWhite machine.
In summary, popular conceptions of AI suggest these machines have general
intelligence, are capable of professional jobs, and/or are poised to surpass and supplant
humanity. In the White imagination, such qualities are strongly associated with White-
ness. It is no surprise, therefore, that in mainstream Western media, such machines areportrayed as White.
3.3 White UtopiaWhile we believe the attribution to AI of these qualities, so strongly associated with
Whiteness, goes a long way to making sense of the racialisation of anthropomorphic
intelligent machines, we also want to propose one further hypothesis: that the White-
ness of the machines allows the White utopian imagination to fully exclude people ofcolour.
One of the most pertinent hopes for artificial intelligence is that it will lead to a life
of ease (Cave and Dihal 2019 ). As a tool that can take over “dirty, dull, or dangerous ”
jobs, it relieves its owners from work they do not want to do, enabling them to pursueleisure. As critical race theorists have repeatedly pointed out, the leisure currentlyavailable to the wealthier classes is disproportionately facilitated by the labour of
working-class women of colour (hooks 1992 1997 ;R h e e 2018 ). bell hooks shows that
the people performing this labour are actively kept invisible, even when the Whitemaster and the coloured servant are physically present in the same space. She cites thememoirs of a White heiress who grew up with Black servants in her house: “Blacks, I
realized, were simply invisible to most white people, except as a pair of hands offeringad r i n ko nas i l v e rt r a y ”(hooks 1992 1997 ,1 6 8 ) .
As this forced pretence of invisibility shows, interactions with non-White servants
are undesirable to the White master: such interactions are almost literally considered a
“dirty job ”. Depictions of people of colour as being dirty and unwashed, eating dirty
food, living in the dirt, even of being the colour of excrement have contributed to thedevelopment of both the fear of pollution in interactions with people of colour, and theassociation of Whiteness with cleanliness and purity (Dyer 1997 ,7 5–76). This associ-
ation has been exacerbated by a long history of propaganda preceding conquest andgenocide that portrays the racial other as evoking disgust: as vectors of disease, such aslice or rats, or as a literal plague (Glover 1999 , chap. 35; Rector 2014 , chap. 3).
The utopia of the White racial frame would therefore rather remove people of colour
altogether, even in the form of servants. From the inception of the academic study of
science fiction onwards, many critics have pointed out that utopias throughout literaryhistory have been construed on exclusionary, colonialist, and eugenicist premises(Suvin 1979 2016, 179; Jameson 2005 ,2 0 5 ;G i n w a y 2016 ,1 3 2 ) .I n Astrofuturism ,
De Witt Douglas Kilgore shows that mid-twentieth-century American visions of spaceage utopias are “idealisations ... based on a series of exclusions ”(Kilgore 2010, 10):
rather than depicting a post-racial or colourblind future, the authors of these utopiassimply omit people of colour.S. Cave, K. Dihal
AI offers the possibility of making such racialised utopias real. By virtue of its
generality, it is imagined as able to replace all and any unwanted labour —social and
cognitive as well as physical (Cave and Dihal 2019 ), so obviating the need for people
of colour in any role. Consequently, as Jennifer Rhee points out, advertisements for realAI such as household robots “are striking in their whiteness ”: they are aimed at
showing white middle-class families an ideal leisurely lifestyle. In doing so, she argues,
“the images reserve the luxury of liberation from domestic labor for white women,
while erasing the women of color who perform this labor, both within their own homesand in the homes of others ”(Rhee 2018 ,9 4 ) .
In some cases, the unsulliedness of this utopia can extend further to exclude all
women. Just as people of colour can be associated with offensive physicality, so canwomen in general, particularly with respect to their reproductive organs. The necessityof sexual intercourse, pregnancy, and childbearing for the continuation of a race thatprides itself on rationality and the ability to transcend its physicality is an offensive
hurdle that has been imagined as transcendable by science for centuries. As Dyer points
out, in the ideology of Whiteness, the elevation of mental over physical prowess hassimultaneously been the White race ’s most valuable achievement and a threat to its own
continuation (Dyer 1997 , 27). It has led to the paradox known as the “White Crisis ”,i n
which the White race is seen as under threat of being overwhelmed by “inferior ”races
that are breeding more prolifically. Transhumanism has been envisioned as a solution tothis White Crisis (Ali 2017 ). Seen as a form of offspring, artificial intelligence offers a
way for the White man to perpetuate his existence in a rationally optimal manner,
without the involvement of those he deems inferior.
4 Conclusion and Implications
Images of AI are not generic representations of human-like machines, but avatars of a
particular rank within the hierarchy of the human. These representations of intelligentmachines —and our future with them —are refracted through the White racial frame;
their Whiteness a proxy for how we perceive their status and potential. This can cause
what is sometimes called representational harms (Blodgett et al. 2020 ). We suggest
three.
First, this racialisation can amplify the very prejudices it reflects. We have argued that
intelligent machines are portrayed as White because that is how the mainstream perceivesintelligence and related desirable characteristics. But equally, the consistent portrayal ofintelligent machines as White itself transmits this association, so sustaining it. As we haveargued elsewhere (Whittlestone et al. 2019 ), bias in representations of AI contributes to a
vicious cycle of social injustice: the biased representations can influence both aspiring
technologists and those in charge of hiring new staff, shaping whom they consider fit forthe field (Cave 2020 ). This could contribute to sustaining a racially homogenous
workforce, which will continue to produce products, whether real intelligent machinesor their representations, that are biased to benefit that group and disadvantage others.
Second, the racialisation of these machines places them within an existing hierarchy
of the human in a way that could exacerbate real injustice. Portrayals of AI as Whitesituate these machines in a power hierarchy above currently marginalised groups, such
as people of colour. These oppressed groups are therefore relegated to an even lowerThe Whiteness of AI
position in the hierarchy: below that of the machine. As machines become ever more
important in making automated decisions —frequently about marginalised groups
(Eubanks 2017 )—this could be highly consequential. Automation bias —the tendency
of people to favour suggestions from automated decision-making systems over thosefrom humans —has already been evidenced (Goddard et al. 2012 ). We might speculate
that it will be exacerbated in cases where such systems are racialised White and the
humans in question are not.
Third, these portrayals could distort our perceptions of the risks and benefits of these
machines. For example, they could frame the debate about AI ’s impact disproportion-
ately around the opportunities and risks posed to White middle-class men (Cave 2020 ).
It is already a common narrative that the current wave of automation differs from thoseof the past in that “impacts from automation have thus far impacted mostly blue-collar
employment; the coming wave of innovation threatens to upend white-collar work aswell”(Pew Research Center 2014 ). Public interest and policy therefore often focus on
white collar professionals, instead of on marginalized groups, which in reality are likely
to be worse affected by the impact of AI (Eubanks 2017 ;N o b l e 2018 ).
In this paper, we have offered three interpretations of the whiteness and Whiteness of
representations of AI. All three, and the implications that we posit, need furtherinvestigation. This process is part of what can be described as decolonising AI :a
process of breaking down the systems of oppression that arose with colonialism andhave led to present injustices that AI threatens to perpetuate and exacerbate. Weheliyedescribes how he “works towards the abolition of Man, and advocates the radical
reconstruction and decolonization of what it means to be human ”(Weheliye 2014 ,4 ) .I t
is in the field of AI that technology is most clearly entwined with notions of “what it
means to be human ”,b o t hi nr e a l i t ya n di nc u l t u r a lf a n t a s i e s .W eh o p et oh a v et a k e na
step towards this reconstruction, by drawing attention to the Whiteness of thesemachines and “making it strange ”.
Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Ezinne Nwankwo, Dr. Lauren Wilcox, Eva Pasini, and
the two anonymous peer reviewers for comments on earlier drafts.
Funding Information Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal are funded by the Leverhulme Trust (via grant
number RC-2015-067 to the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence). Kanta Dihal is additionallyfunded through the support of grants from DeepMind Ethics & Society and Templeton World CharityFoundation, Inc.
Compliance with Ethical Standards
Conflict of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect
the views of the Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which
permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you giveappropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, andindicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in thearticle's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is notincluded in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutoryS. Cave, K. Dihal
regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .
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