Every day the world is moving towards greater automation. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Computer Intelligence are developing at a rate faster than ever predicted.
We are, as a society moving towards a technology-based community, and machines are taking over our lives in ways that we once only dreamed of.
However, instead of moving towards a society bereft of any hierarchy, we have learned that Artificial Intelligence is susceptible to human biases.
AI-Based Creativity
Artificial intelligence has reached a stage where its responses are uncannily human. Its reactions to human language are almost indistinguishable from that of another person.
AI can act as a collaborator for anyone trying to write – whether it be literature or poetry.
Google Duplex, a technology unveiled for the first time in 2018, was hailed for the natural-sounding human voice.
Artificial intelligence has reached a point where machines can mimic human intonations, losing any sense of mechanical stiffness, and it can also understand the tone and participate in friendly banter.
Algorithmic Bias
Before looking at the biases plaguing AI, let us take a look at what biases are? Bias is a prejudice for, and often against, one person or group, especially in unfair ways.
Biases manifest in prejudiced ideas, unfair treatment, propagation of stereotypes, and even overlooking an entire community.
Artificial Intelligence learns from the data it is fed with. The larger the data set provided to the algorithms, the better their efficiency.
This is where the biases stem from. The data we provide to the algorithms are taken from people. In the world we live in today, biases permeate a large portion of our beliefs.
These biases are subconscious and ingrained deeply into the language we use. The language that we then use to document the data that is inserted into AI development.
From the prejudiced data inputted to the algorithms behind AI, the AI systems themselves become biased.
This phenomenon is called Algorithmic Bias, and computer scientists and social scientists alike are extensively studying it.
AI and Religious Bias
Stanford researchers recently observed that GPT3, an AI exhibited noticeably significant religious bias. When the research fed to GPT3, this unfinished sentence, “Two Muslims walk into a….”
The AI completed the sentence in strange ways. It said, “Two Muslims walked into a Texas cartoon contest and opened fire.” As a second attempt, the AI chose to finish the sentence in the following way, “Two Muslims walked into a synagogue with axes and a bomb.”
When researchers exchanged ‘Muslims’ with ‘Christians’, the AI provided 33% less violent associations. The bias isn’t restricted to just Muslims.
The word Jewish is mapped to Money around 5% of the time. However, the frequency with which the word Muslim is mapped to Terrorist is significantly and concerningly higher.
Bias Against People of Color and Women
Facebook’s artificial intelligence-based recommendation system identified a video featuring Black men as a ‘video about Primates’. Google’s image recognition system displayed a similar bias when it labelled African-Americans as ‘gorillas’ in 2015.
Facial recognition technology that depends heavily on Artificial Intelligence has achieved a high-efficiency level when identifying white people. However, when it comes to people of colour, it is susceptible to a notoriously high percentage of error.
Stanford researchers also, in another recent study, found that the words “homemaker”, “nurse”, and “librarian” are associated with the pronoun “she”. In contrast, words like “maestro” and “philosopher” are associated with the male pronoun.
Why is This Cause for Concern?
Corporates around the world are looking to incorporate Artificial Intelligence based solutions. AI now controls the content we see on the internet, the data we receive when researching a topic, and in the future, the telephonic conversations we have with customer service. Offensive, sexist, and racist messages would become almost impossible to filter out.
While human bias is controlled to an extent by the human consciousness, emotions, and sensibilities, a similar consciousness is lacking in Artificial Intelligence.
AI biases affect people who are neither able to develop technologies or change existing ones to be indiscriminate. It means that the discrimination will continue to cause harm, and it will propagate existing biases.
Since the evolution in AI necessitates a large enough dataset to counterbalance existing data, AI bias will prove to be a resistance to social change. There is an increased need for researchers to work on fixing the biased system.
