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"On inbuilt bias in algorithms, Sharkey said: "There are so many biases happening now, from job interviews to welfare to determining who should get bail and who should go to jail. It is quite clear that we really have to stop using decision algorithms, and I am someone who has always been very light on regulation and always believed that it stifles innovation."

"Beginning in 2017, I did a project with artist Trevor Paglen to look at how people were being labelled. We found horrifying classificatory terms that were misogynist, racist, ableist, and judgmental in the extreme. Pictures of people were being matched to words like kleptomaniac, alcoholic, bad person, closet queen, call girl, slut, drug addict and far more I cannot say here. ImageNet has now removed many of the obviously problematic people categories - certainly an improvement - however, the problem persists because these training sets still circulate on torrent sites [where files are shared between peers]."

"In each case, biometric data has been harnessed to try to save time and money. But the growing use of our bodies to unlock areas of the public and private sphere has raised questions about everything from privacy to data security and racial bias."

"Assigning female genders to digital assistants such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa is helping entrench harmful gender biases, according to a UN agency."

The ensuing controversy has sparked renewed debates about the ways in which algorithms can perpetuate biases, yielding unintended and often offensive results.