Racist artificial intelligence? Maybe not, if computers explain their 'thinking'

Growing concerns about how artificial intelligence (AI) makes decisions has inspired U.S. researchers to make computers explain their "thinking." "Computers are going to become increasingly important parts of our lives, if they aren't already, and the automation is just going to improve over time, so it's increasingly important to know why these complicated systems are making the decisions that they are," assistant professor of computer science at the University of California Irvine, Sameer Singh, told CTV's Your Morning on Tuesday. Singh explained that, in almost every application of machine learning and AI, there are cases where the computers do something completely unexpected. "Sometimes it's a good thing, it's doing something much smarter than we realize," he said. Such was the case with the Microsoft AI chatbot, Tay, which became racist in less than a day. Another high-profile incident occurred in 2015, when Google's photo app mistakenly labelled a black couple as gorillas.