11.1 AI Bias and Fairness
If the training data is unfair, the AI will be unfair too - often in ways nobody noticed until it was too late.
Chapter 11: Ethics, Risks, and Challenges
AI learns from data created by humans, and humans have biases. If a hiring model is trained on years of hiring decisions that favoured one group, it can learn to favour that group too.
Real research has shown problems like this. The Gender Shades study (2018) found that some commercial face-analysis systems were much less accurate for darker-skinned women than for lighter-skinned men.
Fixing bias means: more diverse and representative data, testing results across different groups, diverse teams building the tech, and humans reviewing important decisions.
Key takeaways
Biased data → biased AI
Test performance across different groups
Diverse data and teams reduce bias