Who Trained Your A.I.?
Who Trained Your A.I.? Artificial intelligence systems are only as good as the data used to teach them. A lot of that data is old and biased—and quietly shaping our future. By April Glaser The problem with artificial intelligence isn’t that it’s going to get too smart and take over the world, as Elon Musk likes to warn. The problem, rather, is that A.I. is too dumb and kind of already has. Artificial-intelligence software, which automates decision-making, is used by judges to help inform criminal sentencing. It’s used by Google to surface the address of your favorite pharmacy when you type “pharmacy” into your smartphone. Hospitals use A.I. to design treatment plans, and the Associated Press uses it pen articles about minor league sports. But even as A.I. nears ubiquity, it’s not clear that the technology is ready for primetime. Accounts of biases and inequities perpetuated by these systems abound. Take what happened last year when Kabir Alli, a high school student ...