AI can be sexist and racist -- it's time to make it fair

When Google Translate converts news articles written in Spanish into English, phrases referring to women often become'he said' or'he wrote'. Software designed to warn people using Nikon cameras when the person they are photographing seems to be blinking tends to interpret Asians as always blinking. Word embedding, a popular algorithm used to process and analyse large amounts of natural-language data, characterizes European American names as pleasant and African American ones as unpleasant. These are just a few of the many examples uncovered so far of artificial intelligence (AI) applications systematically discriminating against specific populations. Biased decision-making is hardly unique to AI, but as many researchers have noted1, the growing scope of AI makes it particularly important to address.