Bad News: Artificial Intelligence Is Racist, Too

When Microsoft released an artificially intelligent chatbot named Tay on Twitter last March, things took a predictably disastrous turn. Within 24 hours, the bot was spewing racist, neo-Nazi rants, much of which it picked up by incorporating the language of Twitter users who interacted with it. Unfortunately, new research finds that Twitter trolls aren't the only way that AI devices can learn racist language. In fact, any artificial intelligence that learns from human language is likely to come away biased in the same ways that humans are, according to the scientists. The researchers experimented with a widely used machine-learning system called the Global Vectors for Word Representation (GloVe) and found that every sort of human bias they tested showed up in the artificial system.