Are robots racist and sexist? Study reveals AI picks up bias from human language

Artificial intelligence (AI), used widely on algorithms and robotic devices, can be racist as well as sexist just like humans, reveals a new study. The study, conducted by the Department of Psychology, University of Washington and published in the journal Science, shows how artificial intelligence that learns from human language is likely to pick up biases the same way as humans do. The biases range from linking women with stereotypical arts and humanities jobs, to associating European and American names with words that describe happiness, to matching pleasant words with white faces. The research was conducted by focusing on a machine learning tool known as "word embedding", which helps computers interpret speech and text. It builds an algorithmic language, in which the meaning of a word is distilled into a series of numbers.