Communications of the ACM
Flawed AI Makes Robots Racist, Sexist
As companies race to commercialize robotics, the team suspects models with these sorts of flaws could be used as foundations for robots being designed for use in homes, as well as in workplaces like warehouses.
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A robot operating with a popular Internet-based artificial intelligence system consistently gravitates to men over women, white people over people of color, and jumps to conclusions about peoples' jobs after a glance at their face.
The work, led by Johns Hopkins University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and University of Washington researchers, is believed to be the first to show that robots loaded with an accepted and widely-used model operate with significant gender and racial biases. The work is set to be presented and published this week at the 2022 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency.
"The robot has learned toxic stereotypes through these flawed neural network models," said author Andrew Hundt, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech who co-conducted the work as a Ph.D. student working in Johns Hopkins' Computational Interaction and Robotics Laboratory. "We're at risk of creating a generation of racist and sexist robots, but people and organizations have decided it's OK to create these products without addressing the issues."
From Johns Hopkins University
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