I sat at my desk yesterday thinking about everything that’s happened to get me to where I am today. When I graduated from Tuskegee as an engineer, I never would have guessed that I’d be creating an AI startup.

In 2016, I left a good paying (but slow moving) corporate job and launched Diversity Photos. Diversity Photos soon became one of the top minority-owned stock photography platforms in the industry, providing culturally relevant content for large enterprises and agencies.

While scaling Diversity Photos, I integrated artificially intelligent tools to help streamline our processes. However, I quickly became aware of biases that were manifesting in many of the AI products. Some machine learning models would consistently label Black women as “ugly” or Black men as “gorilla.” Needless to say, we promptly stopped using the tools and went back to more manual but accurate notations.

I later started to research AI applications and learned that my experience was just the tip of the iceberg. Bias in AI is already having significant, real-world implications and repercussions – some ML (machine learning) models can’t detect cancer in brown people, or self-driving cars that can’t detect a person in a wheelchair. And yet, these models are still being put into production. History has shown us that technology and innovation will push forward at full speed, bringing along the good and the bad. I decided I wanted to help remove as much of the bad as possible so we can all enjoy the good.

With that in mind, in 2022 we launched Destined AI to help tech companies responsibly create and test AI that could be deployed globally and equitably. Destined AI was accepted into Atlanta Tech Village and into the Zane Access Capital Readiness cohorts. I’m excited that others understand the importance of what we are doing. Here’s to a future where the AI we develop represents the best of what we have to teach it and not the worst.