Decisions about who to interview for a job, who to provide medical care to, or who to grant a loan were once made by humans, but ever more frequently are made by machine learning (ML) algorithms, with eight in 10 firms planning to invest in some form of ML in 2023 according to New Vantage. The number one focus of these investments? Driving business growth with data.
Removing Demographic Data Can Make AI Discrimination Worse
A new study shows that including information about age, gender, and race can produce fairer outcomes.
March 06, 2023
HBR Staff/Sergey Mironov/Getty Images
Summary.
A recent study suggests that denying AI decision makers access to sensitive data actually increases the risks of discriminatory outcome. That’s because the AI draws incomplete inferences from the data or partially substitutes by identifying proxies. Providing sensitive data would eliminate this problem, but it is problematic to do so in certain jurisdictions. The authors present work-arounds that may answer the problem in some countries.