Artificial Intelligence Is Learning to Be Racist

One thing that's certain in our increasingly automated future is that artificial intelligence will play a increasingly central role in our lives. But while we think of these machines as robotic and logical, they can actually acquire cultural biases around race and gender. Researchers from the University of Washington found that a machine learning tool called "word embedding" can absorb biases hidden in language patterns. This tool helps computers make sense of language, and is used in web search and language translation, using a statistical approach to build up a mathematical representation of language and the meaning of words. The study, published in the journal Science, involved the machine pairing word concepts together.