Amazon built AI to hire staff, but discriminated against women

Amazon has been working on creating an artificial intelligence tool to facilitate hiring, but projects failed when the company discovered the system discriminated against women, reports Reuters.

Citing five sources, Reuters said that Amazon had set up a team of engineers in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2014 to find a way to automate its recruitment.

The company has created 500 computer models to browse past candidates' CVs and select approximately 50,000 key terms. The system would explore the Web to recommend candidates.

"They literally wanted it to be an engine in which I will give you 100 hp, it will be the top five, and we will praise it," a source told Reuters.

A year later, however, engineers would have noticed something worrisome for their engine: it did not like women. This is apparently due to the fact that the IA has been scrutinizing the resumes of men submitted to Amazon over a period of 10 years to collect data on who to hire.

As a result, the IA concluded that men were preferable. He would have lowered the curriculum vitae containing the words "women" and screened out candidates who had attended two women's colleges.

Amazon engineers have apparently modified the system to address these particular forms of bias, but they could not be sure that the IA would not find new ways to unfairly discriminate against candidates.

Gender bias was not the only problem, sources told Reuters. Computer programs also recruited unskilled candidates for the position.

Addressing algorithmic bias is a thorny issue because algorithms can detect unconscious human bias. In 2016, ProPublica found that the risk assessment software used to predict criminals most likely to reoffend was racially biased against black people. Excessive reliance on artificial intelligence for items such as recruitment, credit scoring and parole judgments has also created problems in the past.

Amazon reportedly abandoned the AI ​​recruitment project early last year after leaders lost confidence in it. Reuters sources said that Amazon's recruiters had reviewed the recommendations generated by the AI ​​but had never relied on its judgment.

Amazon told Business Insider that he was committed to workplace diversity and equality, but declined to comment further.