AI can develop prejudice

Boston, Sept. 17: Artificially intelligent ( AI) machines can easily learn racism and sexism from each other, say scientists who found that showing prejudice towards others does not require a high level of cognitive ability.

Scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT) in the US and Cardiff University in the UK showed that groups of autonomous machines could demonstrate prejudice by simply identifying, copying and learning this behaviour from one another. It may seem that prejudice is a human- specific phenomenon that requires human cognition to form an opinion of, or to stereotype, a certain person or group.

Though some types of computer algorithms have already exhibited prejudice, such as racism and sexism, based on learning from public records and other data generated by humans, this new work demonstrates the possibility of AI evolving prejudicial groups on their own.

The findings, published in Scientific Reports, are based on computer simulations of how similarly prejudiced individuals, or virtual agents, can form a group and interact with each other. “Our simulations show prejudice is a powerful force of nature and through evolution, it can easily become incentivised in virtual populations, to the detriment of wider connectivity with others,” Whitaker said.

– PTI