Peers call for research to avoid human bias in AI

A House of Lords committee wants the UK government to use the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund to support research on preventing human prejudices being built into artificial intelligence systems.

An ISCF funding call should be launched to develop tools and systems to ensure that the data sets used represent diverse populations, the peers said in a report published on 16 April. This challenge should be established immediately and invite applications for spring 2019, it said.

“We are concerned that many of the data sets currently being used to train AI systems are poorly representative of the wider population, and AI systems which learn from this data may well make unfair decisions which reflect the wider prejudices of societies past and present,” the report said.