Artificial intelligence is a game changer in the workplace, but as Greg Clark warns, it shouldn’t be allowed to make the final decision on employment matters
AI promises to revolutionise the world of work in a variety of ways, including helping HR professionals make all sorts of difficult decisions – from who to hire as the next CEO to who should be made redundant at the conclusion of a redundancy process.
But AI is not necessarily the rational and perfect decision maker it is often thought of as being. In 2018, Amazon realised that a recruitment AI they were developing was biased against women. It had been trained to rate candidates by looking at CVs submitted to Amazon over the previous 10 years. Most of those CVs came from men. As a result, Amazon’s AI concluded that it was better to hire men. It penalised CVs that it believed came from women – for example, because they mentioned being a member of a women’s sports team.
The moral of the story? If you put biased data into an AI, the AI will give you biased outputs. And given the datasets used to train AI are often historical data generated by humans, unbiased data is really hard to come by.
The Amazon recruitment AI was retired five years ago, but, despite the rapid advances in technology, the problem of AI bias is still here. In 2022, researchers predicted that 85 per cent of AI projects would be hampered by bias. So, while the direction of travel for AI may be that it’s getting more powerful, more affordable and more...
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