How to make AI less racist - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

In 2006, a trio of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers published a useful resource for their community, a massive dataset consisting of images representing over 50,000 different noun categories that had been automatically downloaded from the internet. The dataset, dubbed Tiny Images, was an early example of the "big data" strategy in AI research, whereby an algorithm is shown as many examples as possible of what it is trying to learn in order for it to better understand a given task, like recognizing objects in a photo. By uploading small 32-by-32 pixel images, the Tiny Images researchers were relying on the ability of computers to exhibit the same "remarkable tolerance of the human visual system" and recognize even degraded images. They also, however, may have unintentionally succeeded in recreating another human characteristic in AI systems: racial and gender bias. A pre-print academic paper revealed that Tiny Images used several categories for images labeled with racial and misogynistic slurs.