Artificial intelligence: How to avoid racist algorithms

There is growing concern that many of the algorithms that make decisions about our lives - from what we see on the internet to how likely we are to become victims or instigators of crime - are trained on data sets that do not include a diverse range of people. The result can be that the decision-making becomes inherently biased, albeit accidentally. Try searching online for an image of "hands" or "babies" using any of the big search engines and you are likely to find largely white results. In 2015, graphic designer Johanna Burai created the World White Web project after searching for an image of human hands and finding exclusively white hands in the top image results on Google. Her website offers "alternative" hand pictures that can be used by content creators online to redress the balance and thus be picked up by the search engine.