AI, and in particular, machine learning, is being used to make important decisions in many sectors. This brings up the concept of algorithmic bias. What it means is the embedding of a tendency to discriminate according ethnicity, gender, or other factors when making decisions about job applications, bank loans, and so on.
Algorithmic bias isn't a hypothetical threat conceived by academic researchers. It's a real phenomenon that is already affecting people today.
The main reason for algorithmic bias is human bias in the data. For example, when a job application filtering tool is trained on decisions made by humans, the machine learning algorithm may learn to discriminate against women or individuals with a certain ethnic background. Notice that this may happen even if ethnicity or gender are excluded from the data since the algorithm will be able to exploit the information in the applicant’s name or address.
Online advertising
It has been noticed that online advertisers like Google tend to display ads of lower-pay jobs to women users compared to men. Likewise, doing a search with a name that sounds African American may produce an ad for a tool for accessing criminal records, which is less likely to happen otherwise.
Social networks
Since social networks are basing their content recommendations essentially on other users’ clicks, they can easily lead to magnifying existing biases even if they are very minor to start with. For example, it was observed that when searching for professionals with female first names, LinkedIn would ask the user whether they actually meant a similar male name: searching for Andrea would result in the system asking “did you mean Andrew”? If people occasionally click Andrew’s profile, perhaps just out of curiosity, the system will boost Andrew even more in subsequent searches.
There are numerous other examples we could mention, and you have probably seen news stories about them. The main difficulty in the use of AI and machine learning instead of rule-based systems is their lack of transparency. Partially this is a consequence of the algorithms and the data being trade secrets that the companies are unlikely to open up for public scrutiny. And even if they did this, it may often be hard to identify the part of the algorithm or the elements of the data that lead to discriminating decisions.
A major step towards transparency is the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It requires that all companies that either reside within the European Union or that have European customers must:
Upon request, reveal what data they have collected about any individual (right of access)
Delete any such data that is not required to keep with other obligations when requested to do so (right to be forgotten)
Provide an explanation of the data processing carried out on the customer’s data (right to explanation)
The last point means, in other words, that companies such as Facebook and Google, at least when providing services to European users, must explain their algorithmic decision making processes. It is, however, still unclear what exactly counts as an explanation. Does for example a decision reached by using the nearest neighbor classifier count as an explainable decision, or would the coefficients of a logistic regression classifier be better? How about deep neural networks that easily involve millions of parameters trained using terabytes of data? The discussion about the technical implementation about the explainability of decisions based on machine learning is currently intensive. In any case, the GDPR has potential to improve the transparency of AI technologies.
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