The dirty little secret is out about artificial intelligence. This one is more insidious. Data scientists, AI experts and others have long suspected it would be a problem. But it's only within the last couple of years, as AI or some version of machine learning has become nearly ubiquitous in our lives, that the issue has come to the forefront. Name an -ism, and more likely than not, the results produced by our machines have a bias in one or more ways.

Physical beauty is subjective and often difficult to define. But for the robot jury of Beauty.AI, an online competition billed as "the first international beauty contest judged by artificial intelligence," beauty is calculated by a set of complex algorithms that measure parameters like participants' facial symmetry and skin quality. The contest, launched in December, is an experiment by Youth Laboratories, an international team of data scientists and biogerontologists interested in developing anti-aging technologies. Its aim is to test and demonstrate how computers can learn to assess human attractiveness. The robot jury uses algorithms to analyze and rate participants' selfies submitted through the Beauty.AI app.