Can Computer Algorithms Be Free of Bias?
Bias is inevitable but it should be recognized and admittedGregory Coppola’s revelations about Google’s politically biased search engine shone a spotlight on how algorithms are written.
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AI: Think About Ethics Before Trouble Arises
A machine learning specialist reflects on Micah 6:8 as a guide to developing ethics for the rapidly growing profession
Did AI teach itself to “not like” women?
No, the program did not teach itself anything. But the situation taught the company something important about what we can safely automate.Back in 2014, it was a “holy grail” machine learning program, developed in Scotland, that would sift through online resumes, using a one-to-five star rating system and cull the top five of 100, saving time and money. Within a year, a problem surfaced: It was “not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way.”
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GIGO alert: AI can be racist and sexist, researchers complain
Can the bias problem be addressed? Yes, but usually after someone gets upset about a specific instance.From James Zou and Londa Ziebinger at Nature: When Google Translate converts news articles written in Spanish into English, phrases referring to women often become ‘he said’ or ‘he wrote’. Software designed to warn people using Nikon cameras when the person they are photographing seems to be blinking tends to interpret Asians as always blinking. Word embedding, a popular algorithm used to process and analyse large amounts of natural-language data, characterizes European American names as pleasant and African American ones as unpleasant. Now where, we wonder, would a mathematical formula have learned that? Maybe it was listening to the wrong instructions back when it was just a tiny bit? Seriously, machine learning, we are told, depends on absorbing datasets of Read More ›