Trust In Artificial Intelligence, But Not Blindly

Imagine the following situation: A company wants to teach an artificial intelligence (AI) to recognise a horse on photos. To this end, it uses several thousand images of horses to train the AI until it is able to reliably identify the animal even on unknown images. The AI learns quickly – it is not clear to the company how it is making its decisions but this is not really an issue for the company. It is simply impressed by how reliably the process works. Researchers talk in these cases about confounders – which are confounding factors that should actually have nothing to do with the identification process.