Systematic Bias in Artificial Intelligence

Shining a light on one of the biggest problems of tomorrow

Does data really have a better idea? credit: Franki Chamaki on Unsplash

Recently, Dr. Jennifer Lincoln made a TikTok highlighting the multitude of ways that African Americans face discrimination in healthcare such as receiving less pain medication and waiting longer in emergency rooms. The video, based on this study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), has gone viral with 400k+ views on TikTok and nearly 8 million views on Twitter. If an AI model was trained on healthcare records to predict painkiller dosages for patients, it may recommend lower dosages for African American patients because it was trained on a dataset where African American patients received lower dosages. Clearly, this would become very problematic since this hypothetical use case of AI would further institutionalize racism.

Consequences of Bias

As AI becomes increasingly integrated into current systems, systematic bias is an important risk that cannot be overlooked. When models are fed data where a bias towards a certain ethnicity or gender exists, they aren’t able to serve their intended purpose effectively. A model evaluated on a metric such as accuracy, profit etc would attempt to maximize said metric without any regard for biases it forms. If steps aren’t taken to combat this issue, humans, or regulators, more importantly, might lose faith in AI, preventing us from unlocking the potential of the technology. To comprehend the severity of this problem, here are two more frightening examples of bias in AI.

• As outlined in the paper “ The Risk of Racial Bias in Hate Speech Detection ”, Researchers at the University of Washington tested Google’s AI hate speech detector on over 5 million tweets and discovered that tweets from African Americans were twice as liable to be classified as toxic speech compared to people of other races.
• COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) is an algorithm used by New York, California and other states to predict the risk of released prisoners committing another crime. In the research article “ The accuracy, fairness, and limits of predicting recidivism ”, researchers at Dartmouth concluded that “Black defendants who did not recidivate were incorrectly predicted to reoffend at a rate of 44.9%, nearly twice as high as their white counterparts at 23.5%; and white defendants who did recidivate were incorrectly predicted to not reoffend at a rate of 47.7%, nearly twice as high as their black counterparts at 28.0%.” This is extremely troubling given that COMPAS scores can influence the length of a defendant’s sentence.

Fighting Bias

A concern that many critics of AI are vocal about is the “black box” nature of artificial neural networks: a machine learning model can provide an answer to the question we ask, but we can’t understand how the model arrived at that answer due to the complexity of the calculations involved. This opaqueness allows bias to creep in unnoticed. Even beyond bias, consumers/businesses are interested in understanding how AI arrives at its conclusions.

One potential solution for elucidating how AI makes high stakes decisions is interpretable machine learning. As the name suggests, interpretable machine learning involves creating models whose decisions making process is more understandable than black box models. To become interpretable, these models are designed with factors such as additional constraints and the input of domain experts. For example, an additional constraint to prevent bias in loan applications would be compliance: the model must adhere to fair lending laws by not discriminating against consumers of a certain race.

While interpretable machine learning models are more time consuming and expensive to develop due to their increased complexity, the layer of interpretability is definitely worth it for applications like autonomous vehicles, healthcare, or criminal justice where errors have serious repercussions. Human nature makes society resistant to change but more transparent models can begin to make the public/government more receptive to widespread adoption of AI.

Other potential solutions focus on the data the model uses instead of how the model uses data. One proposed method involves taking large datasets that would typically remain confidential (ex. medical data) and release them to the public after removing personally identifiable information. The idea is that bias will be filtered out in these anonymous datasets. Yet, this tactic comes with its own risks as hackers can cross reference data to make it past the layer of anonymity. At the same time, consciously including underrepresented populations would bolster datasets which lack diversity. Finally, fostering diversity among the engineers designing these algorithms should help fight bias.

As AI rapidly advances, proactively combating bias has to remain a priority.