Extract from Claudio Calvino’s article “AI Bias: The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act is Coming – You Need to Be Ready”
Will my loan application be rejected? Will my job application fail screening checks? Will my insurance premiums go up? Around the world, life-changing questions such as these are increasingly being answered by artificial intelligence (AI).
The assumption is that machines will come to fairer conclusions than humans by crunching data and spitting out dispassionate – and therefore unbiased – responses. But because they are trained on data provided, selected, annotated, inputted and updated by humans, the reality is that AI systems are prone to prejudice. Baked-in biases that go unnoticed and unchallenged can be perpetuated and amplified, leaving even the experts at a loss to explain how an algorithm reached its conclusions.
Major firms and governments have been caught out by the phenomenon. Recent controversies have included a recruitment tool found to be biased against women, facial recognition software that returned racially biased results, and a benefits fraud detection system that penalised migrants.
