Alberta companies team up to build AI to combat online racism

Two local companies have teamed up to help fight racism online.

Shani Gwin, founder of pipikwan pêhtâkwan, an Indigenous-led public relations company, says employees encounter racism online frequently.

"As Indigenous people, we’re constantly working on our healing. There’s so many levels of oppression, so many levels of trauma that all it takes is someone who's really ignorant about who we are to send them into a spiral," Gwin told CTV News Edmonton.

"We have anti-racism policies at work but there’s nothing I can do about protecting people and how they might be re-traumatized online," Gwin told CTV News Edmonton.

Now, her company is teaming up with a tech company to try to combat racism against Indigenous people through AI.

"When you’re talking about social media data on Facebook and things like that, there’s a lot of data that comes in and so a lot of data for humans to have to go through," said David Chan of Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii).

"We wanted to explore whether we could use AI and machine learning to help analyse some of that data and triage it to understand whether there’s incidents of overt or covert racism that can then be flagged and treated accordingly."

pipikwan pêhtâkwan commissioned Amii to do a feasibility study on the technology, and now they're ready to build the real thing.

"This AI would be built so that it actually blocks, hides the comment so they can’t continue and it’s a choice, a choice for the person using the platform," said Gwin, adding the AI could also be trained to respond to certain comments.

"So the employee isn’t sitting here going, OK, how am I now going to go outside of my job and teach someone about Indigenous culture. The AI’s going to help me do that with pre-approved messaging."

Work is still underway on the technology, but it's a project Chan is excited about.

"Amii’s mandate is AI for good and for all and keeping discourse safe."

pipikwan pêhtâkwan will be the first adopter of the technology, but both Chan and Gwin hope it will be widely adopted.

"The idea is that we will use it at pipikwan but the other idea is hopefully other Indigenous organizations and non-Indigenous organizations will use it as well," Gwin said, adding it's not about censoring free speech, but reframing how people comment on social media.

"My hope is that if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say it at all."

With files from CTV news Edmonton's Amanda Anderson.