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"Bias in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a popular topic over the last few years as AI-solutions have become more ingrained in our daily lives."

"But it also raises uncomfortable questions: is AI technology helping marginalized people overcome bias, or just perpetuating the biases that make their lives hard in the first place?"

"Facebook is mired in a series of controversies about the curation of its news feed, from its broadcasting live killings, to editing out an iconic photo of the Vietnam war, to accusations of political bias. It recently tried to smooth the process out by firing its human editors … only to find the news feed degenerated into a mass of fake and controversial news stories."

"The economist Oren Cass has a compelling answer for these concerns. He says they suffer from bias: the idea that this technological revolution is somehow unique, when we have lived through many epochs of innovation and upheaval. They also overestimate the pace of change (robots are a long way off from competing with humans in many areas) and assume that new kinds of jobs will not be created in the process."

"Can AI ever be unbiased? As AI systems become more integrated into our daily lives, it's crucial that we understand the complexities of bias and how it impacts these technologies. From chatbots to hiring algorithms, the potential for AI to perpetuate and even amplify existing biases is a genuine concern. "

"That algorithm can make the app powerfully addictive and fun, but like other social media platforms, it may also be cutting out whole swaths of content that you'll never get to see. I ran an experiment by creating two fresh accounts on TikTok. With these accounts, the only bias they start with is knowing my location - Toronto - which brings up content made near me."

"But there is another set of Facebook stories that shines even more glaring light on the company's mismatch of power and responsibility. A good place to start is Sri Lanka: one of many countries where "fake news" is not the slightly jokey notion regularly played up by Trump, but sometimes a matter of life and death."

"This affects all of us every single day. When the algorithms that govern increasingly large parts of our lives have been designed almost exclusively by young bro-grammers with homogeneous experiences and worldviews, those algorithms are going to fail significant sections of society. A heartbreaking example of this is Gillian Brockell's experience of continuing to get targeted by pregnancy-related ads on Facebook after the stillbirth of her son. Brockell, a Washington Post journalist, recently made headlines when she tweeted an open letter to big tech companies, imploring them to think more carefully about how they target parenting ads."

"The Facebook data, which captured the engagement metrics on thousands of posts by the six major party leaders in the two months leading up to the election, was collected by academics at the University of Pisa's MediaLab. It reveals all of the 25 most shared Facebook posts in the two months leading up to the election were videos, live broadcasts or photos from either Salvini, who runs the far-right League, or Di Maio, the leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S)."