Public (AI)ccommodations

Artificial intelligence (AI) has supercharged surveillance and its consequences for civil rights and liberties. AI surveillance technologies, such as facial and affect recognition and other emergent forms of human-centered computer vision, give corporations and governments unprecedented power to identify, locate, track, and make inferences and decisions about people based on images of their faces, bodies, and other physical and behavioral features. This Note discusses the use of AI surveillance in places of public accommodations and its implications for civil rights and antidiscrimination law. Part I documents the extensive AI surveillance employed in areas of public accommodation, where American antidiscrimination laws explicitly provide for elevated protection. Part II uses critical race theory to explore how contemporary antidiscrimination law marries two approaches to antidiscrimination in a way that undercuts its own ability to remedy injustice. Part III reveals how antidiscrimination law fails to address issues implicated by AI surveillance in areas of public accommodations, and Part IV proposes a simple solution: abolish it