Article:

Visual Tactics Toward an Ethical Debugging

To advance design research into a critical study of artificially intelligent algorithms, strategies from the fields of critical code studies and data visualisation are combined to propose a methodology for computational visualisation. By opening the algorithmic black box to think through the meaning created by structure and process, computational visualisation seeks to elucidate the complexity and obfuscation at the heart of artificial intelligence systems. There are rising ethical dilemmas that are a consequence of the use of machine learning algorithms in socially sensitive spaces, such as in determining criminal sentencing, job performance, or access to welfare. This is in part due to the lack of a theoretical framework to understand how and why decisions are made at the algorithmic level. The ethical implications are becoming more severe as such algorithmic decision-making is being given higher authority while there is a simultaneous blind spot in where and how biases arise. Computational visualisation, as a method, explores how contemporary visual design tactics including generative design and interaction design, can intersect with a critical exegesis of algorithms to challenge the black box and obfuscation of machine learning and work toward an ethical debugging of biases in such systems.