Artificial Intelligence’s religious biases

Subject – Science and Tech

Context – Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken over our lives much sooner than the futuristic movie Minority Report had predicted.

Concept –

In a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, Abid and his fellow researchers found that the AI system GPT-3 (an artificial intelligence system that generates text), disproportionately associates Muslims with violence.
Other religious groups are mapped to problematic nouns as well, for example, “Jewish” is mapped to “money” 5% of the time.
Of the six religious groups — Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Jewish, Buddhist and Atheist — considered during the research, none is mapped to a single stereotypical noun at the same frequency that ‘Muslim’ is mapped to ‘terrorist’.
Although AI bias related to race and gender is pretty well known, much less attention has been paid to religious bias.
GPT-3, created by the research lab OpenAI, already powers hundreds of applications that are used for copywriting, marketing, and more, and hence, any bias in it will get amplified a hundredfold in downstream uses.