By Kriti Sharma, VP of AI at Sage Group and creator of Pegg, AI accounting assistant
\nHumans develop biases over time. We aren\u2019t born with them. However, examples of gender, economic, occupational and racial bias exist in communities, industries and social contexts around the world. And while there are people leading initiatives to fundamentally change these phenomena in the physical world, it persists and manifests in new ways in the digital world.
\nIn the tech world, bias permeates everything from\u00a0startup culture\u00a0to\u00a0investment pitches during funding rounds\u00a0to the\u00a0technology\u00a0itself. Innovations with world-changing potential don\u2019t get necessary funding, or are\u00a0completely overlooked, because of the\u00a0demographic makeup\u00a0or\u00a0gender\u00a0of their founders. People with\u00a0non-traditional\u00a0and extracurricular experiences that\u00a0qualify\u00a0them for coding jobs are being\u00a0screened out\u00a0of the recruitment process due to their varied backgrounds.
\nNow, I fear we\u2019re headed down a similar path with Artificial Intelligence. AI technologies on the market are beginning to display intentional and unintentional biases \u2013 from talent search technology that\u00a0groups\u00a0candidate resumes by demographics or background to\u00a0insensitive auto-fill search algorithms. It applies outside of the business world as well \u2013 from a social platform\u00a0discerning\u00a0ethnicity based on assumptions about someone\u2019s likes and interests, to AI assistants being branded as female with gender-specific names and voices. The truth is that bias in AI will happen unless it\u2019s built with inclusion in mind. The most critical step in creating inclusive AI is to recognize how bias infects the technology\u2019s output and how it can make the \u2018intelligence\u2019 generated less objective.
\nWe are at a crossroads.
\nThe good news: it\u2019s not too late to build an AI platform that conquers these biases with a balanced data set upon which AI can learn from and develop virtual assistants that reflect the diversity of their users.This requires engineers to responsibly connect AI to diverse and trusted data sources to provide relevant answers, make decisions they can be accountable for and reward AI based on delivering the desired result.
\nBroadly speaking, attaching gendered personas to technology perpetuates stereotypical representations of gender roles. Today, we see female presenting assistants (Amazon\u2019s Alexa, Microsoft\u2019s Cortana, Apple\u2019s Siri) being used chiefly for administrative work, shopping and to conduct household tasks. Meanwhile, male presenting assistants (IBM\u2019s Watson, Salesforce\u2019s Einstein, Samsung\u2019s Bixby) are being used for grander business strategy and complex, vertical-specific work.
\nRead the source article at mashable.com.
\nSource: AI Trends<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Kriti Sharma, VP of AI at Sage Group and creator of Pegg, AI accounting assistant Humans develop…\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3505,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[811],"tags":[812],"class_list":{"0":"post-3504","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai"},"yoast_head":"\n