Author: John P. Mello Jr.
Publisher: Tech News World
Publication Year: 2022
Summary: The following article discusses how bias in artificial intelligence (AI) systems can result in significant losses for companies, according to a new survey by an enterprise AI company. Approximately 1 in 3 companies (36 percent) revealed they had suffered losses due to AI bias in one or several algorithms. Of the companies damaged by AI bias, almost two thirds (62 percent) lost revenue (62 percent) or customers (61 percent), while nearly half lost employees (43 percent) and over a third incurred legal fees from litigation (35 percent). Participants in the survey also revealed that algorithms used by their organizations inadvertently contributed to bias against people by gender (34 percent), age (32 percent), race (29 percent), sexual orientation (19 percent) and religion (18 percent). “AI-based discrimination — even if it’s unintentional — can have dire regulatory, reputational, and revenue impacts.”
There are multiple criteria for evaluating the fairness of AI systems, and determining the right approach depends on the use case and its societal context. One of the most prominent uses of AI in the news these days is facial recognition. There has been widespread documentation of racial bias in facial recognition. The systems are much less reliable when seeking to identify Black people, which happens when a system is trained with photos that do not represent enough people from a particular racial group or photos of that group aren’t of good quality. People who create algorithms bring their own biases to the creation of those algorithms. For example, if an algorithm is being created by a 30-year-old man who is white, the biases that he brings are likely to be different from a 30-year-old woman who is African American. Most companies have strong market incentives to eliminate bias in AI systems because they want their algorithms to be accurate, but sometimes market forces to eliminate bias are ineffective. Eight out of 10 of the technologists (81 percent) said government regulation could be helpful in two areas: defining and preventing bias. However, nearly half of those surveyed (45 percent) admitted they were worried regulation could increase their cost of doing business. In addition, nearly a third of the respondents (32 percent) expressed concern that without regulation, certain groups of people could be hurt. What’s needed is a holistic approach to address ethical responsibility.