Microsoft chatbot is taught to swear on Twitter
Obviously, this is a very crude example of AI acting in a racist manner -- basically, just parroting back phrases -- but it's worth thinking about how AI might exhibit racist tendencies in more sophisticated ways.For instance, at least here in the U.S., it is illegal for police to profile people based on race, even if there is data that shows that race might, in the aggregate, have some predictive value.  And I think most of us agree that it is good that it is illegal, because we know that it is unfair to show bias against a person based on the color of their skin.But what about a bot, particularly one that is powered by the type of AI that is complex enough to make its own inferences and form its own conclusions based on the data presented, rather than being fed a bunch of rules?I could totally see that kind of AI exhibiting bias, because it's (I would imagine) harder to say, "Hey, take into account these very complex, nuanced social rules," than it is to say, "Hey, here's a dataset.  Cluster the people in the set."