AI script finds bias in movies before production starts

The “Spellcheck for bias” tool makes film and TV more diverse by identifying percentages of representation and dialogue in scripts.

Spotted: The GD-IQ (Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient) Spellcheck for Bias analysis tool reviews film and television scripts for equality and diversity. Geena Davis, the founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, recently announced a yearlong pilot programme with Walt Disney Studios. The Spellcheck for Bias tool will be used throughout the studio’s development process.

Funded by Google, the GD-IQ uses audio-visual processing technologies from the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering together with Google’s machine learning capabilities. 

The tool’s analysis reveals the percentages of representation and dialogue broken down into categories of gender, race, LGBTQIA and disability representation. The analysis also highlights non-gender identified speaking characters that could help improve equality and diversity. 

Designed to help identify unconscious bias before it becomes a publicly consumed piece of media, the tool also ranks the sophistication of the characters’ vocabulary and their relative level of power within the story.

The first study of film and television representation using the GD-IQ examined the top 200 grossing, non-animated films of 2014 and 2015. Unsurprisingly, the more diverse and equal a film’s characters were, the more money the film earned.