Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women
The eye opening thing here is not that the AI failed, but why it failed.At start the AI is like a baby, it doesn't know anything or have any opinions. By teaching it using a set of data, in this case a set of resumes and the outcome then it can form an opinion.The AI becoming biased tells that the "teacher" was biased also. So actually Amazon's recruiting process seems to be a mess with the technical skills on the resume amounting to zilch, gender and the aggressiveness of the resume's language being the most important (because that's how the human recruiters actually hired people when someone put a resume).The number of women and men in the data set shouldn't matter (algorithms learn that even if there was 1 woman, if she was hired then it will be positive about future woman candidates). What matters is the rejection rate which it learned from the data.. The hiring process is inherently biased against women.Technically one could say that the AI was successful because it emulated the current Amazon hiring status.