Debiasing of AI for Self-Driving Cars

One example from the 1980's is another old-time favorite. It is said that the Department of Defense was trying to analyze pictures of tanks. They wanted to be able to use the computer to distinguish US tanks from Russian tanks. Rather than programming it per se, they used lots of pictures of tanks and labeled the pictures as either showing a Russian tank or a US tank. At first, it seemed that the system was able to distinguish between the two. After more careful inspection, it turns out that the algorithm was only focusing on the aspects of how grainy the photo was.