Are AI systems biased against the poor?

Among the myriad of technical approaches and abstract guidelines proposed to the topic of AI bias, there has been an urgent call to translate the principle of fairness into the operational AI reality with the involvement of social sciences specialists to analyse the context of specific types of bias...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Curto, Georgina|||0000-0002-8232-3131, Jojoa Acosta, Mario Fernando|||0000-0002-6578-071X, Comim, Flavio|||0000-0003-0941-734X, Garcia-Zapirain, Begoña|||0000-0002-9356-1186
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2022
País:España
Institución:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:292930
Acceso en línea:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/292930
https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.1007/s00146-022-01494-z
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Bias
Artificial intelligence
Embeddings
Poverty
Descripción
Sumario:Among the myriad of technical approaches and abstract guidelines proposed to the topic of AI bias, there has been an urgent call to translate the principle of fairness into the operational AI reality with the involvement of social sciences specialists to analyse the context of specific types of bias, since there is not a generalizable solution. This article offers an interdisciplinary contribution to the topic of AI and societal bias, in particular against the poor, providing a conceptual framework of the issue and a tailor-made model from which meaningful data are obtained using Natural Language Processing word vectors in pretrained Google Word2Vec, Twitter and Wikipedia GloVe word embeddings. The results of the study offer the first set of data that evidences the existence of bias against the poor and suggest that Google Word2vec shows a higher degree of bias when the terms are related to beliefs, whereas bias is higher in Twitter GloVe when the terms express behaviour. This article contributes to the body of work on bias, both from and AI and a social sciences perspective, by providing evidence of a transversal aggravating factor for historical types of discrimination. The evidence of bias against the poor also has important consequences in terms of human development, since it often leads to discrimination, which constitutes an obstacle for the effectiveness of poverty reduction policies.