Concerns Of AI And Bias Insights from AI4ALL’s Tess Posner
Read Kathleen Walch’s article in Forbes about AI bias and how AI4ALL is trying to help solve this.
Humans are naturally prone to having bias. External factors, opinions and feelings all help influence the decisions we make. Machine learning forms the core of modern AI systems, with deep learning algorithms being particularly popular. These algorithms are very data hungry. Specifically, what makes these systems effective is a large quantity of good training data that is relevant to the area in which you’re trying to achieve some machine learning objective. However, the machine learning data is only as good as the data you feed it. What if there are implicit or explicit biases in this training data? It follows that the AI system will inherit those same biases. Some of these can be easy to spot, but sometimes it’s more subtle than anyone can initially realize which can have significant unintended consequences.
Diverse teams equal more diverse data
The AI Today podcast interviewed Tess Posner, CEO at AI4All, a non-profit organization that focuses on increasing the diversity of AI. Unfortunately the tech industry today is very homogeneous; there are not many women or people of color in the field. AI4All aims to bring a more diverse background to the AI world. Research has consistently shown that working in a group with little to no diversity leads to less productivity and less imaginative thinking. AI4All’s goal is to help bring new people into the AI industry who may not have otherwise gotten into the industry.
Check out the full article in Forbes here.
