Why Fairer AI Is Essential For Long-Term Survival

Introduction

In my most recent post, I covered some areas that I hope to see evolve in the next year and beyond. How we can do more with data across industries is, of course, an important consideration for data scientists, businesses, and society as a whole, as better models lead to improved products and services. 

When machine learning models for cancer diagnoses show promise, we naturally rally around this positive step and rejoice in the vision of a brighter future because it’s a victory that touches us all in some way. But there are many other ways AI can and must be used for good in the world, and in my next few posts, I want to use a financial services example that affects all of us, to show how that can be achieved. 

Making AI Facial Recognition Less Racist

AI has famously been rather poor at recognizing faces in a non-racist way. The size of the challenge was highlighted by recent work from MIT and Stanford University, which found that three commercially available facial-analysis programs displayed considerable biases against both gender and skin-types.

For instance, the programs were nearly always accurate in determining the gender of light-skinned men but had an error rate of over 34 percent when it came to darker-skinned women.