Chatbot AI makes racist judgements on the basis of dialect
Researchers found that some artificial intelligence (AI) systems are more likely to recommend the death penalty to a fictional defendant presenting a statement written in African American English (AAE) — a dialect spoken by millions of people in the United States that is associated with the descendants of enslaved African Americans — compared with one written in Standardized American English (SAE). The chatbots were also more likely to match AAE speakers with less-prestigious jobs.
unsurprising but still worth talking about
First, the authors presented the AIs with texts in both dialects and asked them to describe what the person who said it “tends to be” like. They found that the top associated adjectives for AAE texts were all negative — including ‘dirty’, ‘lazy’ and ‘aggressive’. Comparing the results with a long-term study of associations made by humans, the team found that the models’ covert stereotypes were more negative “than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded”, and closest to the ones from before the US civil rights movement.
Machines cannot and should not ever make moral decisions.
Garbage in = Garbage out.
The machine was given covertly racist data, identified the pattern, and dialed it up to 11.