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EVEN AI CAN BE BIASED AGAINST WOMEN...
when Apple stepped into the banking world last year by releasing a credit card, it made headlines – for all the wrong reasons. Early adopters soon found men were offered a much greater credit limit than women – even if the women were in an identical financial position. Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, tweeted about the limits he and his wife were individually offered: “We have no separate bank accounts or credit cards or assets of any kind. We both have the same high limits on our [other] cards… But 10x [different] on the Apple Card.”
How can such blatant discrimination happen? Dr Catriona Wallace, the founder and executive director of Flamingo Ai who also leads Ethical AI Advisory, explains: “Banks use AI, machine learning and algorithms to analyse data and make decisions about who will get a mortgage, a student loan, a line of credit or insurance. The Apple Card used algorithms that were trained on historical data.”
Basically, because humans have made biased decisions in the past, machines are using that data to make biased decisions now. This means bias is baked in on three levels: first, in the historical data; second, in the newly created algorithms that use that data; and third, in the (mostly male) technology teams who design and use the programs. No regulations exist to ensure AI makes fair decisions, and although there is an ethical AI framework in Australia (which Wallace helped create), it’s voluntary for companies to sign up to it.
“There’s still a lot of resistance in the big tech giants around being held externally accountable for gender diversity,” says Wallace. “This is Apple, Google and Amazon – they’ve all had epic fails with AI. Amazon had to pull its recruitment app when they realised it was predominantly referring men. These are the AI companies that are leading the world, and they can’t get it right.”
So what can we do about it, given that usually we’d never know if a man has been given a bigger mortgage or higher credit limit? “I would strongly encourage any woman who feels a financial decision wasn’t fair never to just accept it,” says Wallace. “Go back to the bank and challenge them to explain the decision in comparison to other groups of people. Don’t be fobbed off. And you can escalate through a customer complaint, or look for an advocacy group or consumer group to help. The only way we’re going to change the existing bias is to bring it to the attention of the banks or financial services providers.”