AI bias is real

 

When I was a child, looking someone up in the Yellow Pages(phone book) was my Google search. And the only smart device I had was a solar-powered LED calculator. Now, the internet has become so ingrained in, that I would never have a life without it. Intelligence that’s mechanized and simulated by a computer is called Artificial Intelligence(AI). The AIs are trained to be adept at imitating human beings. When Google’s Smart Compose technology autocompletes sentences, I find them brash, cocky and acts as if they know almost everything. And now ChatGPT’s responses to our queries show how overconfident the AIs have got. 
I take the AI’s prompts and responses with a pinch of salt because after all, they are a bunch of program instructions that can’t perceive things fully. When a timely or a favourable bit of data pops up on our screen take time to analyze it. Computer scientist Alan Turing proposed the imitation game to test a machine’s ability to mimic human behaviour. On some occasions, these AIs fool us into believing that we’re talking to a real person. Even if we don’t fall into the trap, our reality is somewhat muddied by the AIs. It’s not the AI’s fault. But before we accept AI’s responses as true, it won’t hurt to use our minds to have a think about it.
Now do these thinking machines have a gender? AIs are supposed to be gender neutral but because we made them they could also have the same bias that we have. AI’s are commonly given feminine avatars to play virtual assistants and chatbots. Although there are alternate masculine voices, the default is feminine. That’s probably because of a commonly held image of women as helpful companions. The problem starts with who’s coding the AI. It’s general knowledge that the male brain does not work in the same way as the female brain. So, when the AI workforce comprises mostly men, imagine how the training samples end up skewed to favour men. It also applies to ethnic bias, age bias, and so on. People’s voices easily get swallowed up by the more dominant group. Unless diversity of all kinds is incorporated into the AI and the tech workforce, one group would receive preferential treatment based on some dumb code while other groups of people are ignored. At the moment, Alexa and Siri may sound like a female, but AI remains obstinately male. Are we going to nix it, or fix it?