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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Good fucking luck. Here's a fascinating article about Amazon's attempt to use AI for hiring, which to their credit, they realized was a bad idea and scrapped: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight-idUSKCN1MK08G
In short, it was trained on past hiring data, so taught itself from sexist hiring preferences made by humans. It absolutely not designed to be sexist and I'm sure the devs had good intentions, but it taught itself how to be sexist.
And here's a different but similar AI having some even subtler issues:
To be very clear, these issues stem at their root from human biases, so not using an AI is not going to save you from bias and in fact may well be even more biased because at least AI can be the work of entire teams doing their best to combat bias. But it can end up discriminating in very subtle and unfair ways, like how it was penalizing certain schools. It can end up perpetuating past bad behavior and make it harder to improve.
Finally, this article is about Amazon noticing these biases and actively trying to correct them. This law is a good thing, because otherwise many companies won't even do that. While still imperfect, Amazon could have played whackamole trying to root out biases (it sounds like they did for a while before giving up). Many companies won't even do that, so we need laws like this to force them to at least do so. Of course, ideally anti bias laws would also apply to humans, since we are just as vulnerable.