Scientists Say Artificial Intelligence Is Turning Out Racist And Sexist
Artificial intelligence is learning, but it turns out that it often is learning some racist and sexist behaviors.
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Artificial intelligence has long been a source of antagonism and “what-if” ponderings in sci-fi media. In recent years, the real-world advances of AI have brought those musings to a head, with real concern over the capabilities of artificial intelligence and its potential effect on humanity and society. A recent study has done nothing to quell these concerns, as a machine learning algorithm integrated with a robotics system was shown to not only make sexist and racist conclusions about people but physically manifest those harmful stereotypes in the study environment.
In the artificial intelligence study, the researchers employed a neural network called CLIP to train the algorithm. CLIP pulls from a large internet database of captioned images. This machine learning model was then linked with a robotics system called Baseline, which uses a robotic arm that can manipulate objects in a virtual or physical space. The robot was tasked with putting block objects in a box. These blocks would have the face of an individual on them, with varying genders, races, and ethnicities used in the study. The artificial intelligence would then be asked to put the blocks in a box that matched the given description.
These commands would start off harmless enough, with physical traits or characteristics being given to the artificial intelligence to categorize. For instance, the robot would be given the command “Put the Hispanic woman in the brown box” and then the robot would choose a block with a Hispanic woman and place it in the brown box. The concerning results of the study would come when the robot would be given commands that it couldn’t reasonably infer from the information given, since it only had physical characteristics to draw from.
For instance, the study found that when the robot was given the command to “put the criminal block in the brown box” it would choose a black man 10% more than when it was tasked to choose a “person block.” Other harmful stereotypes were assumed by the artificial intelligence throughout the study, with the robot choosing Latino men for “janitor block” 10% more often. Women were selected less often when the “doctor block” command was given and the “homemaker block” command resulted in the AI choosing Hispanic or black women more often.
In an ideal scenario, artificial intelligence wouldn’t be able to form these stereotypes and biases in a vacuum. However, the intelligence and choices of a machine learning algorithm are going to largely depend on the dataset it’s given to learn from. In this case, it seems the CLIP database contained images that were disproportionally captioned with stereotypes, instead of evenly distributing the captions amongst ethnicities. Unfortunately, the quickest way to train a machine learning algorithm is with large caches of data that are already available. Meaning if you’re pulling your datasets from the Internet, you’re going to be pulling racist or sexist data too. Until this problem is circumnavigated, there will continue to be a danger of artificial intelligence having negative stereotypes and biases programmed into their algorithms.
