AI Programs Exhibit Racial and Gender Biases, Research Reveals (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: An artificial intelligence tool that has revolutionized the ability of computers to interpret everyday language has been shown to exhibit striking gender and racial biases. The findings raise the specter of existing social inequalities and prejudices being reinforced in new and unpredictable ways as an increasing number of decisions affecting our everyday lives are ceded to automatons. In the past few years, the ability of programs such as Google Translate to interpret language has improved dramatically. These gains have been thanks to new machine learning techniques and the availability of vast amounts of online text data, on which the algorithms can be trained. However, as machines are getting closer to acquiring human-like language abilities, they are also absorbing the deeply ingrained biases concealed within the patterns of language use, the latest research reveals. Joanna Bryson, a computer scientist at the University of Bath and a co-author, warned that AI has the potential to reinforce existing biases because, unlike humans, algorithms may be unequipped to consciously counteract learned biases. The research, published in the journal Science, focuses on a machine learning tool known as "word embedding," which is already transforming the way computers interpret speech and text.

Comments

Re:Bias bias bias

[dbIII]

Well.... The idea is if you can declare place X a "safe space

Yes - start with a bakery. First keep the gays out and then work on the races.
There's more of that bullshit going on than the massive conspiracy theory you are going on about just because blackface is not polite anymore in comedy or whatever your trivial little playing the victim gripe is. If you are "triggered" by gays then just harden up instead of complaining that nobody is putting them in prison any more.

Re:I'm with you

[religionofpeas]

It's when racism is part of the basic makeup of society. If you want to put a stop to it I think you kinda need to take a hammer to it

You can't stop it, if there's a real and fundamental bias. Black people have genes that are optimized for living near the equator. White people have genes optimized for living at higher latitudes, where it gets cold, and there's no food in the winter unless you plan in advance and learn to cooperate with your enemies.

Where are you taking your hammer to fix that ?

Re: Or rather...

[prisoner-of-enigma]

And you can't expect an AI system to ignore the elephant in the room.

Why not? The SJW's have made ignoring elephants in rooms into an art form. Why shouldn't we expect them to want to do the same to an AI they can manipulate and imbue their own reality-denial into?