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"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. "

"The independent review on equity in medical devices once again highlights the multiple ways in which medical technology development can lead to solutions whereby the benefits are distributed inequitably across society, or can further exacerbate health inequalities (UK report reveals bias within medical tools and devices, 11 March). While the report is welcome, the challenge facing scientists and engineers is how to innovate medical devices differently to respond to longstanding societal biases and inequalities."

"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."

"A pilot study by academics at the University of Oxford found some care providers had been using generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard to create care plans for people receiving care. That presents a potential risk to patient confidentiality, according to Dr Caroline Green, an early career research fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford, who surveyed care organisations for the study. "If you put any type of personal data into [a generative AI chatbot], that data is used to train the language model," Green said. "That personal data could be generated and revealed to somebody else." She said carers might act on faulty or biased information and inadvertently cause harm, and an AI-generated care plan might be substandard."

"This week, a 16-person narrative design studio has found itself at the centre of a conspiracy theory that holds it responsible for the insidious prevalence of "wokery" in modern video games. A group with more than 200,000 followers on PC games storefront Steam, as well as thousands in a Discord chat channel, believes that Sweet Baby Inc is secretly forcing game developers to change the bodies, ethnicities and sexualities of video game characters to conform to "woke" ideology. They think that Sweet Baby has written and controlled almost every popular video game of the past five years, shutting straight white men out. As Trump once again heads out on the campaign trail, this is part of a broader far right panic about diversity and inclusion that has already resulted in proposed regressive anti-women and anti-woke legislation in the US and elsewhere."

"Applying to some of the most common customer and food service jobs in the country now requires a long and bizarre personality quiz featuring blue humanoid aliens, which tells employers how potential hires rank in terms of "agreeableness" and "emotional stability." If you've applied to a job at FedEx, McDonald's, or Darden Restaurants (the company that operates multiple chains including Olive Garden) you might have already encountered this quiz, as all these companies and others are clients of Paradox.ai, the company which runs the test and helps them with other recruiting tasks."

"Google has put a temporary block on its new artificial intelligence model producing images of people after it portrayed German second world war soldiers and Vikings as people of colour. The tech company said it would stop its Gemini model generating images of people after social media users posted examples of images generated by the tool that depicted some historical figures - including popes and the founding fathers of the US - in a variety of ethnicities and genders."

"Rite Aid facial recognition misidentified Black, Latino and Asian people as 'likely' shoplifters Surveillance systems incorrectly and without customer consent marked shoppers as 'persons of interest', an FTC settlement says Johana Bhuiyan and agencies Wed 20 Dec 2023 14.29 EST Last modified on Thu 21 Dec 2023 12.04 EST Rite Aid used facial recognition systems to identify shoppers that were previously deemed "likely to engage" in shoplifting without customer consent and misidentified people - particularly women and Black, Latino or Asian people - on "numerous" occasions, according to a new settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. As part of the settlement, Rite Aid has been forbidden from deploying facial recognition technology in its stores for five years."

"A Taiwanese American model says a well-known fashion designer uploaded a digitally altered runway photo that made her appear white. In a TikTok about the incident that has been viewed 1.8m times in the last week, Shereen Wu says Michael Costello, a designer who has worked with Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, and Celine Dion, posted a photo to his Instagram from a recent Los Angeles fashion show. The photo depicts Wu in the slinky black ballgown that she walked the runway in - but her face has been changed, made to appear as if she is a white woman."

""Essentially what this is doing is flattening descriptions of, say, 'an Indian person' or 'a Nigerian house' into particular stereotypes which could be viewed in a negative light," Amba Kak, executive director of the AI Now Institute, a U.S.-based policy research organization, told Rest of World. Even stereotypes that are not inherently negative, she said, are still stereotypes: They reflect a particular value judgment, and a winnowing of diversity. Midjourney did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or comment for this story."

"If you've been job hunting recently, chances are you've interacted with a resume robot, a nickname for an Applicant Tracking System, or ATS. In its most basic form, an ATS acts like an online assistant, helping hiring managers write job descriptions, scan resumes and schedule interviews. As artificial intelligence advances, employers are increasingly relying on a combination of predictive analytics, machine learning and complex algorithms to sort through candidates, evaluate their skills and estimate their performance. Today, it's not uncommon for applicants to be rejected by a robot before they're connected with an actual human in human resources. The job market is ripe for the explosion of AI recruitment tools. Hiring managers are coping with deflated HR budgets while confronting growing pools of applicants, a result of both the economic downturn and the post-pandemic expansion of remote work. As automated software makes pivotal decisions about our employment, usually without any oversight, it's posing fundamental questions about privacy, accountability and transparency."

"How that effects systems of governance has yet to be fully explored, but there are cautions. "Algorithms are only as good as the data on which they are based, and the problem with current AI is that it was trained on data that was incomplete or unrepresentative and the risk of bias or unfairness is quite substantial," says West. The fairness and equity of algorithms are only as good as the data-programming that underlie them. "For the last few decades we've allowed the tech companies to decide, so we need better guardrails and to make sure the algorithms respect human values," West says. "We need more oversight.""

"Countries around the world are deploying technologies-like digital IDs, facial recognition systems, GPS devices, and spyware-that are meant to improve governance and reduce crime. But there has been little evidence to back these claims, all while introducing a high risk of exclusion, bias, misidentification, and privacy violations. It's important to note that these impacts are not equal. They fall disproportionately on religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities, migrants and refugees, as well as human rights activists and political dissidents."

"AI and the American Smile How AI misrepresents culture through a facial expression."

"One of the beautiful things about the internet is the sheer amount of knowledge it contains: if you're interested in any topic, you can find a surfeit of information about it in an instant. But this can also have a downside. Search engines can end perpetuating bias, for example. And research by Adrian Ward from the University of Texas, Austin suggests that we can mistake information we've searched for as our own knowledge. Now, in a new paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Ward and colleagues have found that sharing information online also makes us feel that our knowledge has increased - even if we haven't read it."

"What if facial recognition technology isn't as good at recognising faces as it has sometimes been claimed to be? If the technology is being used in the criminal justice system, and gets the identification wrong, this can cause serious problems for people (see Robert Williams' story in "Facing up to the problems of recognising faces")."

"One of the many policy-based projects I worked on at Meta was Engagement Bait, which is defined as "a tactic that urges people to interact with Facebook posts through likes, shares, comments, and other actions in order to artificially boost engagement and get greater reach." Accordingly, "Posts and Pages that use this tactic will be demoted." To do this, "models are built off of certain guidelines" trained using "hundreds of thousands of posts" that "teams at Facebook have reviewed and categorized." The examples provided are obvious (eg. a post saying "comment "Yes" if you love rock as much as I do"), but the problem is that there will always be far subtler ways to get people to engage with something artificially. As an example, psychology researchers have a long history of studying negativity bias, which has been shown to operate across a wide array of domains, and to lead to increased online engagement. "

"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?"

"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."

""As expected, we found evidence of a performance improvement over generations due to social learning," the researchers wrote. "Adding an algorithm with a different problem-solving bias than humans temporarily improved human performance but improvements were not sustained in following generations. While humans did copy solutions from the algorithm, they appeared to do so at a lower rate than they copied other humans' solutions with comparable performance." Brinkmann told Motherboard that while they were surprised superior solutions weren't more commonly adopted, this was in line with other research suggesting human biases in decision-making persist despite social learning. Still, the team is optimistic that future research can yield insight into how to amend this."