The Customer Experience Will Be Transformed By AI

For every great advance in artificial intelligence (AI), offering a chance for machines to truly think and be more useful than ever before, there is always a negative story supporting the fear that humans may one day be subservient to their creations. A recent online beauty pageant with 600,000 entrants using an AI judging process was blasted by critics when almost all the winners were white. Of course the AI system needs to learn from how someone defines beauty before it can start teaching itself from additional examples. In this case the vast majority of images that were initially used to define beauty were images of white people. Skin tone was not a factor in the judging process, but with the desirable attributes mostly defined as those more common in white people it's hardly a surprise that the AI system effectively learned how to be racist.