To avoid bias, AI needs to 'explain' itself

Can a credit card be sexist? It's not a question most people would have thought about before this week, but on Monday, state regulators in New York announced an investigation into claims of gender discrimination by Apple Card. The algorithms Apple Card used to set credit limits are, it has been reported, inherently biased against women. Tech entrepreneur David Heinemeier Hansson (@DHH) claimed that the card offered him 20 times more credit than his wife, even though she had the better credit score, while Apple's own co-founder Steve Wozniak went to Twitter with a similar story, despite he and his wife sharing bank accounts and assets. Goldman Sachs, the New York bank that backs the Apple Card, released a statement rejecting this assertion, saying that when it comes to assessing credit, they "have not and will not make decisions based on gender."