A new Stanford study suggests AI still has a bias problem

AI Index co-director Jack Clark (currently co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, formerly of OpenAI) tells Fast Company that the AI industry is currently engaged in a debate over whether it's best to remove toxicity and bias by more careful curation of the training data, or by increasing the size of the training data set to the point where the "good" training data pushes the bad content to the margins. As tech companies large and small hurry to make big language models available through APIs or as cloud-based services, "it becomes critical to understand how the shortcomings of these models will affect safe and ethical deployment," the researchers write. There are also signs that AI companies are not ignoring the bias and ethics challenges of the technology. Researchers with industry affiliations contributed 71% more publications year-over-year in 2021 at fairness-focused industry conferences, the report says.