The work, led by Johns Hopkins University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and University of Washington researchers, is believed to be the first to show that robots loaded with an accepted and widely-used model operate with significant gender and racial biases. The work is set to be presented and published this week at the 2022 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT). "The robot has learned toxic stereotypes through these flawed neural network models," said author Andrew Hundt, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech who co-conducted the work as a PhD student working in Johns Hopkins' Computational Interaction and Robotics Laboratory. "We're at risk of creating a generation of racist and sexist robots but people and organizations have decided it's OK to create these products without addressing the issues." Those building artificial intelligence models to recognize humans and objects often turn to vast datasets available for free on the Internet.

A robot on show at a Russian state-sponsored event has turned out to be a man dressed in a costume. Robot Boris featured on Russian TV and was apparently able to walk, talk and dance. But soon after its appearance journalists began to question the bot's authenticity. In a picture published afterwards on social media, the neck of a person was clearly visible. The robot is in fact a 250,000 rouble (£2,975) costume called Alyosha the Robot, made by a company called Show Robots. While the organisers of the Proyektoria technology forum - which was aimed at youngsters - had not claimed the robot was real, the TV coverage on Russia-24 suggested it was.