What is AI bias?

"Bias" is an overloaded term which means remarkably different things in different contexts. Here are just a few definitions of bias for your perusal. There are quite a few meanings here, and some of them are spicier than others. The young discipline of ML/AI has a habit of borrowing jargon from every-which-where (sometimes seemingly without looking up the original meaning), so when people talk about bias in AI, they might be referring to any one of several definitions above. Imagine getting yourself prepared for the emotional catharsis of an ornate paper promising to fix bias in AI… only to discover (several pages in) that the bias they're talking about is the statistical one.