Submitted via IRC for chromas
Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc’s (AMZN.O) machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women.
The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters.
Automation has been key to Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company’s experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars - much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said.
[...] But by 2015, the company realized its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way.
That is because Amazon’s computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry.
In effect, Amazon’s system taught itself that male candidates were preferable. It penalized resumes that included the word “women’s,” as in “women’s chess club captain.” And it downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges, according to people familiar with the matter. They did not specify the names of the schools.
Amazon edited the programs to make them neutral to these particular terms. But that was no guarantee that the machines would not devise other ways of sorting candidates that could prove discriminatory, the people said.
The Seattle company ultimately disbanded the team by the start of last year because executives lost hope for the project, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Amazon’s recruiters looked at the recommendations generated by the tool when searching for new hires, but never relied solely on those rankings, they said.
rinciples.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Thursday October 11 2018, @02:21PM (5 children)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:47PM (3 children)
There were only two resumes with that word in it so the AI figured they were undesirable
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Friday October 12 2018, @01:32PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday October 13 2018, @12:10AM (1 child)
Here is a problem: my resume says physics. If it were used for training ais, because only one resume says physics physicists would be regarded as undesirable
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday October 15 2018, @02:17PM
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday October 12 2018, @03:24PM
That was my initial thought as well, but based on TFS I don't think they DID feed it gender, or at least they didn't intend to. The problem is that the fields they did feed it sometimes included gender information anyway which they didn't attempt to sanitize. You might not tell it I'm a male, but if you give it my extracurriculars which include the men's track team, then it doesn't really matter...
But I also can't help thinking....if you don't want to be discriminated against due to your gender, *maybe* you shouldn't be proudly announcing the fact that you ran/joined an organization whose membership criteria was based largely on gender...