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Amazon Scraps Secret AI Recruiting Tool That Showed Bias Against Women (reuters.com)
Jeffrey Dastin, reporting for Reuters: Amazon's machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women. The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants' resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters. Automation has been key to Amazon's e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company's experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars -- much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said. "Everyone wanted this holy grail," one of the people said. "They literally wanted it to be an engine where I'm going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we'll hire those." But by 2015, the company realized its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way. That is because Amazon's computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry.
[...] Amazon edited the programs to make them neutral to these particular terms. But that was no guarantee that the machines would not devise other ways of sorting candidates that could prove discriminatory, the people said. The Seattle company ultimately disbanded the team by the start of last year because executives lost hope for the project, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
[...] Amazon edited the programs to make them neutral to these particular terms. But that was no guarantee that the machines would not devise other ways of sorting candidates that could prove discriminatory, the people said. The Seattle company ultimately disbanded the team by the start of last year because executives lost hope for the project, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
It lets them make immoral business decisions but not be personally held accountable for them.
Facebook shows real estate ads only to white professionals. Amazon only hires male chinese engineers. Google endlessly manipulates its search for political reasons.
But when questions get asked, it's always that pesky old AI that did it!
Get used to it.
When you read this article it doesn't say anything about this algorithm not 'liking woman'. Based on the parameters it was given it chose to rank candidates based upon the factors it was trained to look for. It's also somewhat telling how the writers of this tripe chose to specifically highlight how the algorithm chose to downgraded candidates from two all female colleges without saying why they were downgraded. As if the fact that it's an all female school is more important than the quality of the candidates that came out of the school.
At the end of the day this bullshit is more about how the media writes headlights to illicit emotional reactions instead of reporting the hows and the whys of a situation. And on that note I'd like to see someone actually start writing algorithms to to replace tech reporters so we can get ride of garbage tier activist journalism like this article.
there's a huge gender imbalance in nursing and primary education as well; when will society get around to 'fixing' that?