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 MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:45PM (1 child)
... of the users they will be shown to
This has been reported in the press yet strangely no one cares, meanwhile our republican Congresscritters are raining hellfire and brimstone down on the liberals who run Silicon Valley
While the FB job ads are built on the same code as all their "Boosted Posts", that FB knows damn well they are employment ads can be seen from the fact that users can submit applications directly to the ads
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday October 12 2018, @03:29PM
Off the top of my head I'm aware of two lawsuits against Facebook over these kinds of practices, so I wouldn't exactly say that nobody cares or that nobody is doing anything about it....
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/business/economy/facebook-job-ads.html [nytimes.com]
https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/17/technology/facebook-housing-discrimination/index.html [cnn.com]