Bias in data‐driven artificial intelligence systems--An introductory survey

Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms are widely employed by businesses, governments, and other organizations in order to make decisions that have far-reaching impacts on individuals and society. Their decisions might influence everyone, everywhere, and anytime, offering solutions to problems faced in different disciplines or in daily life, but at the same time entailing risks like being denied a job or a medical treatment. The discriminative impact of AI-based decision-making to certain population groups has been already observed in a variety of cases. For instance, the COMPAS system for predicting the risk of re-offending was found to predict higher risk values for black defendants (and lower for white ones) than their actual risk (Angwin, Larson, Mattu, & Kirchner, 2016) (racial-bias). In another case, Google's Ads tool for targeted advertising was found to serve significantly fewer ads for high paid jobs to women than to men (Datta, Tschantz, & Datta, 2015) (gender-bias).