Despite recent leaps forward in image quality, the biases found in videos generated by AI tools, like OpenAI's Sora, are as conspicuous as ever. A WIRED investigation, which included a review of hundreds of AI-generated videos, has found that Sora's model perpetuates sexist, racist, and ableist stereotypes in its results. In Sora's world, everyone is good-looking. Pilots, CEOs, and college professors are men, while flight attendants, receptionists, and childcare workers are women. Disabled people are wheelchair users, interracial relationships are tricky to generate, and fat people don't run.

Dr Rodda, a senior lecturer in psychiatry at Kent and Medway Medical School - with an interest in artificial intelligence (AI), said she had only been able to get an answer from Alexa when she specified it was women's football she was interested in,.

Smart home devices understand men better than women, according to a new YouGov survey. It found 67 per cent of female owners say that their device fails to respond to a voice command at least'sometimes', compared to 54 per cent of male owners. It also revealed men are ruder to their devices but experience fewer problems being understood. Men are more likely to take an brusque tone with theirs than women yet women have more problems with getting a response to their commands. The smart devices seem to respond less well to women than men, based on the survey results.

This story starts with your average magazine rack circa March last year. Mindlessly browsing the covers, my eyes glazing over at the endless rows of healthy people, one magazine stood out. There was something uncanny about this model staring out under the headlines. She was adorned in an outrageous silver gown. Her face was almost contorted in a painful show of happiness.

StitchFix CEO Katrina Lake posted this on Twitter on the day of her company's IPO in 2017. Automated translation is using the same kind of models for suggesting words that are sometimes laced with bias. Parents know one particular challenge of raising kids all too well: teaching them to do what we say, not what we do. A similar challenge has hit artificial intelligence. As more apps and software use AI to automate tasks, a popular data-backed model, called "word embedding," has also picked up entrenched social biases.

While scenarios like The Matrix and I, Robot might seem like folly, AI picks up behaviors from we humans. As a result, some AIs adapt based on new information. Others, regrettably, can become racist, murderous, and/or sexist. Can we prevent AIs from learning negative behaviors and traits? If you're a fan of science fiction, you've no doubt seen the movie The Fifth Element.

We live in a fractured world that is increasingly becoming polarised with shrill voices intent on drowning out dissent. We have divided ourselves, created inequalities and are steeped in prejudices that we have carried for years. It's not a perfect world, and how can it be -- we are after all humans, intolerant, and unfair. However when it comes to machines, the expectations change. The first words that usually come to mind are: cold, calculating and unbiased.