I enjoyed this interview and especially the title: “Humans Don’t Realize How Biased They Are Until AI Reproduces the Same Bias, Says UNESCO AI Chair.”
What are some core problems or research areas you want to approach?
People are now solving problems just by throwing an enormous amount of computation and data at them and trying every possible way. You can afford to do that if you are a big company and have a lot of resources, but people in developing countries cannot afford the data or the computational resources. So the theoretical challenge, or the fundamental challenge, is how to develop methods that are better understood and therefore don’t need experiments with hundreds of variants to get things to work.
Another thing is that some of the problems with current datasets, especially in terms of the usefulness of these systems for different cultures, is that there is a cultural bias in the data that has been collected. It is Western data informed with the Western way of seeing and doing things, so to some extent having data from different cultures and different environments is going to help make things more useful. You need to learn from data that is more relevant to the task.
Humans Don’t Realize How Biased They Are Until AI Reproduces the Same Bias, Says UNESCO AI Chair
And of course:
“Solving” is probably too strong, but for addressing those problems, as I’ve said, the problem is that we don’t realise that they are the reflections of our own problems. We don’t realise how biased we are until we see an AI reproduce the same bias, and we see that it’s biased.
I chuckle a bit when I hear about biased humans going over biased data in the hopes of creating unbiased data. Bias is a really hard problem, and it’s always going to be with us in one form or another. Education and awareness are the most important tools for addressing.