Study finds AI systems exhibit human-like prejudices

Whether we like to believe it or not, scientific research has clearly shown that we all have deeply ingrained biases, which create stereotypes in our mind that can often lead to unfair treatment of others. As artificial intelligence (AI) plays an increasingly important role in our lives as decision makers in self-driving cars, doctor offices, and surveillance, it becomes critical to ask whether AI exhibits the same inbuilt biases as humans. According to a new study conducted by a team of researchers at Princeton, many AI systems do in fact exhibit racial and gender biases that could prove problematic in some cases. One well established way for psychologists to detect biases is the Implicit Association Test. Introduced into the scientific literature in 1998 and widely used today in clinical, cognitive, and developmental research, the test is designed to measure the strength of a person's automatic association between concepts or objects in memory.