Is AI Really Biased Against Women?

“Decades and generations of fighting for equality and against discrimination can be almost erased by one line of code.” Miriam Vogel on Green Connections Radio

Have you ever noticed that Siri, Alexa and other digital assistants’ voices are female? And that the names of the sophisticated problem-solving artificial intelligence systems like IBM Watson and Microsoft’s Einstein are named after men? That’s what a United Nations study found recently.

Artificial intelligence – or AI – has become so ubiquitous now it’s almost taken for granted as a magic tool.  It can seem magical when it synthesizes reams of medical data to identify treatments for one disease that had only been considered for much different ones.

Yet, AI is only as good as the data it’s “taught” and programmed with, and those come from humans. All humans have biases, so all that data and programming could be biased too as a result of who is programming it.

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