Discrimination by algorithm: scientists devise test to detect AI bias

There was the voice recognition software that struggled to understand women, the crime prediction algorithm that targeted black neighbourhoods and the online ad platform which was more likely to show men highly paid executive jobs. Concerns have been growing about AI's so-called "white guy problem" and now scientists have devised a way to test whether an algorithm is introducing gender or racial biases into decision-making. Mortiz Hardt, a senior research scientist at Google who led the work, said: "Decisions based on machine learning can be both incredibly useful and have a profound impact on our lives ... Despite the need, a vetted methodology in machine learning for preventing this kind of discrimination based on sensitive attributes has been lacking." A beauty contest was judged by AI and the robots didn't like dark skin Hardt's was one of several papers on detecting discrimination by algorithms to be presented at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Barcelona this month, indicating a growing recognition of the problem. Nathan Srebro, a computer scientist at the University of Chicago and co-author, said: "We are trying to enforce that you will not have inappropriate bias in the statistical prediction."