In 2019, Angle Bush challenged herself to build a cocoa-serving robot. As she researched where to start on YouTube, she kept hearing about artificial intelligence; intrigued, she decided to attend a local meetup in Houston for AI enthusiasts. Bush came away with two conclusions—that the technology would be tremendous, and that there were very few women of color in the field.
She never built that robot, but she did start the membership-based organization Black Women in Artificial Intelligence (BWIAI). In the years since, her platform has supported Black women pushing into the field and turned her into a go-to expert for the likes of Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon to diversify their workforce. The organization offers training, mentorship programs, and other professional support.
BWIAI has 155 members around the world, 11 of whom developed and deployed AI products prior to representing BWIAI at Nvidia’s GTC Conference in San Jose in March. “Almost every single day I go into our Slack channel and ask my members, ‘Are you building? Are you in the lab?’ Because I think that’s the most important place that we can be right now,” Bush tells TIME.
She hopes a more diverse creator class will diminish troubling biases that AI models tend to exhibit. “When we’re part of the ecosystem, we can look at these things from a lived experience,” she says. “We won’t completely eliminate bias, but we can mitigate it.”
