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Comment by kareemsabri | Hacker News Reader

This doesn’t seem to be a reasonable conclusion. There is no reason to assume the AI’s assessment methods will mirror those of the recruiters. If Amazon did most of it’s hiring when programming was a task primarily performed by men, and so Amazon didn’t receive many female applicants, they could be unbiased while still amassing a data set that skewed heavily male. The machine would then just correctly assess that female resumes don’t match, as closely, the resumes of successful past candidates. Perhaps I’m ignorant about AI, but I don’t see why the number of candidates of each gender shouldn’t increase the strength of the signal. “Aggressiveness” in the resume may be correlated but not causal. If the AI was fed the heights of the candidates, it might reject women for being too short, but that would not indicate height is a criteria of Amazon recruiters hiring.

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This is a subtle point but worth stating -- AI does not mirror or copy human reasoning.

AI is designed to get the same results as a human. How it gets to those results is often very, very different. I'm having trouble finding it, but there was an article a while back trying to do focus tracking between humans and computers for image recognition. What they found was that even when computers were relatively consistent with humans in results, they often focused on different parts of the image and relied on different correlations.

That doesn't mean that Amazon isn't biased. I mean, let's be honest, it probably is; there's no way a company this large is going to be able to perfectly filter or train every employee and on average tech bias trends against women. BUT, the point is that even if Amazon were to completely eliminate bias from every single hiring decision it used in its training data, an AI still might introduce a racial or gendered bias on its own if the data were skewed or had an unseen correlation that researchers didn't intend.

The whole aim of the AI was to make decisions like the recruiters did -- that is explicitly what they were aiming to do. It might be worth reading the article as it addresses your two ideas (the aim of the project and the fact that the training set was indeed heavily male).

Hey. I did read the article. It doesn’t support the conclusion OP is drawing. The aim of the AI is to “mechanize the search for talent”. It doesn’t care to, nor have any means to, make decisions “like the recruiters did”. Obviously machines don’t make decisions like humans do. They’re trying to reverse engineer an alternate decisions making process from the previous outcomes.

Aren't the "previous outcomes" past hiring decisions though?

Yes, but you have to know what pool you started with. As an overly simplistic example, if a bank used historical mortgage approval records from primarily German neighbourhoods to train AI, it might become racist against non-Germans despite that it’s just an artifact of the demographics of the time. I think it just shows how not ready for prime time AI is.

So the recruiters may or may not have been biased, but if the previous outcomes were (based on the candidate pool) then the AI is sure to have been "taught" that bias.

Unless Amazon is willing to accept a) another pool of data or b) that the data will yield bias and apply a correction, the AI is almost guaranteed to be taught the bias.

Yep, I agree a skewed dataset is not good for the task of correcting an unequal distribution and is likely to maintain or even increase it.

> The aim of the AI is to “mechanize the search for talent”. It doesn’t care to, nor have any means to, make decisions “like the recruiters did”.

This is why AI is so confusing. All "AI" does is rapidly accelerate human decisions by not involving them, so that speed and consistency are guaranteed. They are not replacements for human decision making, they are replacements for human decision making at scale.

If we can't figure out how to do unbiased interviews at the individual level, then AI will never solve this problem. Anyone that tells you otherwise is selling you snake oil.

This is all happening before the interview, even. The AI, as far as I can see from the article, was just sorting resumes into accept/reject piles, based on the kinds of resumes that led to hire/pass results in the hands of humans.

> If we can't figure out how to do unbiased interviews at the individual level, then AI will never solve this problem. Anyone that tells you otherwise is selling you snake oil.

I wonder to what extent people want to solve it and perhaps more importantly whether or not it can be solved at all...

Control question for if you're making a certain intellectual mistake.

The data set will also have skewed heavily against people named "David". Probably only ~1% of the successful applicants.

Would you also expect the machine to be biased against candidates named David?

What if people named David got hired 10/100 times in the past but people named Denise only got hired 6/100 times?

Hiring practices as expressed in the data get picked up by the machine and applied accordingly. As such, David is predicted to be a better hire than Denise.

This is not about "David" vs. "Denise", but how the machine learning process will aggregate and classify names. David and David-like names will come out on top while obscure names it has no idea how to deal with (0/0 historically) will probably be given no weighting at all.

Sorry "Daud!" Our algorithm says David is better.

I would expect the AI isn't fed names as an input, but rather things Amazon wants to weigh like experience, awards and education.

This isn't correct, the worry isn't that a single group is small, its that a single group is large. (basically if one group is large, you can get by ignoring all the smaller groups).

This is most common with binary problems.

I'm going to make a supposition here but one of the first things I think they did (especially when trying to fix the AI) was to balance and normalize the data so that there would be no skew between men and women number of records in the data set.

If my supposition is correct then the other parameters are at fault here from which gender and language used stick out.

Another supposition I'm going to make is that they even removed the gender from the data set so that AI didn't know it, but cross-referencing still showed "faulty" results due to hidden bias that the AI can pick up, like language used.

If they did normalize the data across gender, then you’re correct it may indicate bias on Amazon’s part. But I don’t know about that. The article doesn’t provide enough information. I think it should be obvious, to Amazon as well, that if you want to repair inequality in a trait (gender) you can’t use an unequal dataset to train a machine to select people. I just don’t think it follows that machine bias must mirror human bias.

Did you read the article?

(Serious question. Not intended as snark. Genuinely wondering if I'm missing some deeper current in your post?)

Twice. It doesn’t support OP’s conclusions.

"they could be unbiased while still amassing a data set that skewed heavily male" - this sounds like a self contradiction

Is the NBA biased against white guys?

I don't know - is it? What is the difference between bias and inferring information from skewed data?

Bias, to me, is the active (perhaps unconscious) discrimination based on a trait. Skew is an unequal distribution of that trait as a result of bias in favor of other traits, historical circumstances, or anything other than discrimination.

The NBA wants good basketball players. If they happen to be white, I imagine they'd draft them with equal enthusiasm as any other player. So no, it isn't.

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