Why Audits Are the Way Forward for AI Governance - Knowledge@Wharton

When organizations use algorithms to make decisions, biases built into the underlying data create not just challenges but also engender enormous risk. What should companies do to manage such risks? The way forward is to conduct artificial intelligence (AI) audits, according to this opinion piece by Kartik Hosanagar, a Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions who studies technology and the digital economy. This column is based on ideas from his book, A Human's Guide to Machine Intelligence. Much has been written about challenges associated with AI-based decisions. Some documented failures include gender and race biases in recruiting and credit approval software; chatbots that turned racist and driverless cars that fail to recognize stop signs due to adversarial attacks; inaccuracies in predictive models for public health surveillance; and diminished trust because of the difficulty we have interpreting certain machine learning models.