Episode 8
What Happens When AI Only Knows Western Food?
Many AI models are built with Western food in mind, so what happens when you show one a plate of Ghanaian food? Leah and Jenny sit down with Silas Bempong, an AI engineer in Ghana, to find out.
Silas left a stable job as a data scientist in banking because he wanted to work with the latest technology. His work now centres on an AI model that analyses a photo of a meal and gives nutritional insights, which came out of a partnership with the Noguchi Memorial Institute. Traditional dietary assessment is expensive because a dietitian has to follow someone around and measure every ingredient in their food. Silas’s team wanted people to be able to take a photo instead.
Then there was the challenge of Ghanaian dishes, where it is hard for a model to tell where the rice ends and the beans begin. Silas talks about adapting the technology for local food, how multimodal AI improved its accuracy, and who gets left out when AI isn’t built with Africa in mind.
In this episode:
- Why Silas left banking to work in AI
- How a photo of a meal can give nutritional insights
- Why Ghanaian food is so difficult for AI to read
- What multimodal AI is and how it helped
- Why AI needs to be built for local contexts
Get the book:
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Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/AI-Equity-Creating-Equitable-Society/dp/1837428573
Come to a launch:
Manchester, Tue 10 Nov, The Portico Library: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ai-for-equity-who-is-it-actually-built-for-tickets-2000640564785
London, Thu 12 Nov, University of Westminster: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ai-for-equity-book-launch-london-tickets-1997144173986
Accra, 22 to 28 Nov, and the San Francisco Bay Area, 15 to 19 Mar 2027. All tour dates: https://jennygarrett.global/ai-for-equity/
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