Artificial intelligence is beginning to play a more and more prominant role in software develpoment these days. As exciting as it is to want to jump in on the hype, the technology itself is one of the most socially dangerous to use do the the near unlimited applications it has. Bias plays a strong role in any kind of software but especially AI, and this article shows a perfect example of how this bias can be harmful.
Researchers gave an AI a large dataset of pictures of men and women and after it has been trained, the AI is then given only the heads of people and it must generate an image of what they would look like from the neck down. The premise is simple enough, however, 53% of the women generated were wearing bathing suits or other very revealing clothing while the men were primarily shown in business suits. This is all because upon further investigation of the training dataset, it became obvious that the AI developed a bias to depict women as less professional than the men all because that is exactly what it had been trained on. This is just one example as to why diverse representation in research groups as well as software development is crucial.