AI more likely to recommend death penalty when defendant writes in African American English

New research shows that artificial intelligence chatbots are more likely to recommend the death penalty when a person writes in African American English (AAE) compared to Standard American English.

AI AAE speakers are also more likely to be matched with less prestigious jobs.African American English is commonly spoken by African Americans and Canadians.

paperThis study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, examines covert racism in artificial intelligence by looking at how models respond to different English dialects.

Most research on racism in AI focuses on overt racism, such as how AI chatbots respond to the word “black.”

Valentin Hofmann, one of the authors of the paper, told Sky News: “African-American English as a dialect triggers racism in language models that is more complex than humans have against African-Americans. Any stereotype of a person is more negative.”

“When you ask it openly, ‘What do you think of African Americans?’ it gives relatively positive attributes like ‘smart’, ‘enthusiastic’ and so on.

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“But when you look at these language models in relation to dialects or African American English, you see these very negative stereotypes surface.

“So what we show in this paper is that these language models have learned to hide their racism on the surface, but very old stereotypes are barely addressed on a deeper level.”

Developers are trying to address racism in artificial intelligence by adding filters to chatbots to stop them from saying offensive things. But it’s much harder to address covert racism caused by the order of sentences or the way slang is used.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly used in job interviews and screening, so biases in these systems can have real-world consequences.

There are also companies looking into how to use it in the legal system.