According to an international study conducted by a few universities, including the John Hopkins University, disclosed in a statement that a robot operating with a popular internet-based artificial intelligence system consistently gravitates toward men over women.
The robot is said to have a preference for White people over people of color, and it also jumps to conclusions about people’s jobs after a glance at their face.
A research conducted by a few experts, reveals that this is the first-ever research carried out that shows that robots loaded with an accepted and widely-used model, operate with significant gender and racial biases.
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A study by author Andre Hurdt who carried out research on these robots, disclosed that these robots learned those toxic stereotypes through flawed neural network models.
He added “we are at risk of creating a generation of racist and sexist robots, but people and organizations have decided that it’s okay to create these products without addressing the issue. Those building artificial intelligence models to recognize humans and objects often turn to vast datasets available for free on the internet. But the Internet is also notoriously filled with inaccurate and overtly biased content, meaning that algorithms built with these datasets could be infused with the same issues”.
A test was also carried out by a team of researchers to test a widely downloadable artificial intelligence model for robots, that was built with the chip neural network which allows these robots to see and identify objects by names.
The robot was tested with a few tasks, and the team of researchers found out that these robots were incapable of carrying out their assigned task without bias, where it played out certain significant stereotypes on many occasions.
For instance, the robot picked white people more over black people, it also profiled black men as criminals while it preferred white men. These groups of researchers disclosed that such findings are sadly surprising.
It is quite disheartening that even AI robots that should be void of biases have been infiltrated with weird traits. To prevent future AI machines from adopting these weird stereotypes, researchers disclosed that a systematic change to research and business practices is needed.
Such systems need to be changed because they can pose a very big challenge in society. It might interest you to know that it is fast becoming a thing that AI robots are enacting malignant stereotypes which call for serious intervention, because of the high probability of a negative outcome.
Unfortunately, manufacturers of these robots have shown autonomous racist and scientific behavior which is already encoded into robots with AI.