The bias behind Artificial Intelligence (AI) proved a prime topic to launch the True Story festival's 2023 program.

More than 70 people, including the Member for Cunningham, Alison Byrnes, gathered at Coledale Community Hall on Saturday afternoon to hear award-winning journalist Tracey Spicer discuss her new book, Man-Made, with True Story festival director Caroline Baum.

Tracey – who spent six years researching the book – explained that it all began with her son wanting a ‘robot slave’.

“My son is now 18, he's going through the HSC at the moment,” she said.  “When he was 11, he turned to me one morning over breakfast and said, ‘Mum, I want a robot slave.’

“I said, 'Darling, what are you talking about?’

“Anyway, we are appalling parents – we wanted to sleep in. So we let him watch South Park, the adult cartoon. And Cartman, a very naughty boy, was ordering around his Amazon Alexa like he was some kind of colonial master. And that's where my son got the idea of a robot slave from.

“As a lifelong feminist and journalist, it was a lightbulb moment.

“I thought this 1950s ideal of women and girls being servile is being built into the machines that the next generation and the generation after that will be using every single day.

"And when you look at the arc of progress, you know, the great Martin Luther King Jr. said, the arc of moral progress is long, but it bends towards justice.

“We always have this hope that things will become fairer. That's the nature of the word progress. But with technology, I actually fear that we will go backwards in this next generation because the past is being embedded in the future.”

Fittingly, her book’s cover was designed by AI, even though Tracey had to send it back to the drawing board a few times.

“It took us about 12 seconds to create that cover, but it also revealed some of the biases in the image generation technology. For example, I wanted a strong robot woman looking to the future with concern, but as soon as we put in 'Strong Robot Woman', the algorithm came up with an image of a really sexualised gold robot woman with a tiny waist and massive breasts, but also huge biceps, because the algorithm read ‘strong’ as only being physically strong. We really had to work to get that image. But it was a fascinating process.”

Tracey gave examples of the times AI got things horribly wrong, such as the racially biased Marriott hotel soap dispenser – its AI light sensor didn't respond to the hands of a Nigerian tech worker but did work for his white colleague. She spoke of men using smart home tech as a form of coercive control and gaslighting, of how the overwhelming majority of sex robots globally are made in the female form, and her sole encounter with a male sex robot (named Henry).

Addressing fears of job losses, Tracey said when AI started to explode, it began in the manufacturing space. “There are a lot of blue-collar jobs that were lost, predominantly by men. Then it moved into transport with Uber, which was a global phenomenon, terrible culture in that place – I wrote a whole chapter about that.

“The research shows in the next five years, the jobs that will affect most will impact women. In fact, 90% of the job losses or reductions will be women. And that is in the roles of the executive assistant … things like cashiers, jobs in retail and hospitality, which women dominate. And it'll also be jobs in developing countries that will go, more than developed countries.

“And again, this is why it's structural. We see the people who are suffering the most will suffer more in the future.”

Identifying the problem is one of the first steps to tackling it and Tracey left the audience with a message of hope.

“The power is in our hands. We can't let the robots master us. We must master them to create the kind of future we want.”

For more inspiring conversations, check out the program for the 2023 True Story festival, a collaborative event organised by South Coast Writers Centre, Caroline Baum of Life Sentences and the Illawarra Flame, with funding from Culture Bank Wollongong and support from Coledale RSL and Collins Booksellers Thirroul.

Authors at True Story 2023 include:

• Bronwyn Adcock, winner of the Walkley Book Award for Currowan;
• Dharawal language book author Dr Jodi Edwards, a Yuin woman with Dharawal kinship;
• Stand-up comedian and radio broadcaster Wendy Harmer, author of the candid memoir Lies My Mirror Told Me;
• A titan of investigative journalism, multi award-winning journalist and author Chris Masters;
• Turkish Australian writer Eda Gunaydin, with her fiery debut collection of essays, Root and Branch
• Gerringong cheesemaker, farmer and From Scratch author Fiona Weir Walmsley;
• Broadcaster Indira Naidoo, with insights from her bestselling memoir, The Space Between the Stars;
• Inspirational CEO and founder of AIME (Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience), Bunjalung man Jack Manning Bancroft, author of Hoodie Economics.
• Former ABC Editorial Director Alan Sunderland, presenting a workshop based on his book, The Ten Rules of Reporting.

To book tickets, visit the South Coast Writers Centre's website