Amazon scraps its AI recruiting tool upon realizing it discriminated against women. No one is surprised. Credit: Thinkstock “History is written by the victors,” Winston Churchill famously said. (The irony, I’m sure, was unintentional; Churchill himself being one of those ‘victors’ who, while best known for leading Western Europe through WWII, was a white, straight, cis-het man with violent imperialist ambitions and was unabashedly racist.) In artificial intelligence (AI), too, it seems, future predictions — whether of company performance, advertising effectiveness, and in the recent case of Amazon’s AI recruiting and hiring tool — are also determined by the “victors.” Reuters reported last week that, like a lot of large enterprise tech companies, Amazon attempted to leverage AI and machine learning to help its HR teams process the multitude of resumes and job applications it received. In simple terms, Amazon fed its AI tool historical data on past successful hires and tasked it with looking for similar traits, skills, and experience in new resumes. Can you guess what happened? The AI displayed a bias against women. This is not surprising, nor is this the first incident of its kind. I was talking yesterday with Chris Nicholson, CEO of AI/deep learning company Skymind and the co-creator of the Deeplearning4J framework, about this exact problem. “AI is only as smart and as accurate as the historical data you’re feeding it. So, of course, you look at history; the literary canon – most of Western history, and if you’re an AI, you assume, ‘Oh, I guess only white dudes accomplished anything,’” he said. “You’re feeding it biased data, so of course it’s going to spit out biased results!” Ankit Somani, co-founder of AI recruiting software company AllyO, said the same earlier this year. “In tech, if you’re looking at candidates for technical roles, the majority are going to be white men. So if you just throw all those inputs into the system and go with whatever comes out, then you’ll see your system making the correlation between, say, a developer and then associating that with a white man,” Somani told me. “Based on the data it received, it’s not wrong. But if you aren’t understanding how the current lack of diversity is impacting these systems, then you can exacerbate the problem.” Even when Amazon engineers edited the tool to mitigate the bias, there wasn’t a guarantee that the tool wouldn’t devise other discriminatory ways to sort candidates — so the tool was scrapped. There’s obviously a lot of potential for AI in the recruiting space, but first the huge problem of bias has to be addressed, otherwise it’s just exacerbating tech’s representation problem. Unfortunately, as Nihar Shah, who teaches machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, said in the Reuters article, there is still much work to do. “How to ensure that the algorithm is fair, how to make sure the algorithm is really interpretable and explainable — that’s still quite far off,” he said. Related content news analysis Google workers hold sit-in to protest retaliation In November 2018, Google workers walked out to protest the companyu2019s handling of sexual harassment allegations. Now, many say the company has retaliated, and they had no choice but to hold a sit-in. By Sharon Florentine May 03, 2019 4 mins Google IT Jobs Careers opinion Stopping workplace violence is everyone’s responsibility Tech companies have a social responsibility to help stem the tide of hatred and violence. By Sharon Florentine Apr 12, 2019 5 mins Staff Management IT Leadership news analysis Gender pay gap shrinks, but there’s still a lot of work to do Computer programmers saw the greatest pay gap reduction, but look beyond that, and you see how inequality for women exists in different ways. By Sharon Florentine Mar 29, 2019 5 mins Salaries Staff Management Careers news analysis D&I tech market grows as diversity and inclusion become a business priority There's been a flurry of activity in the diversity and inclusion (D&I) technology space as the tech industry uses its strengths to address discrimination and lack of representation. By Sharon Florentine Mar 01, 2019 4 mins C-Suite Staff Management IT Leadership Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe