E-tika podcast – How to deal with biased AI

Season 2, Episode 2 – We don’t often realize how dependent on the decisions of artificial intelligence our lives are. Its algorithms don’t serve only for better navigation in a city or for filtering our emails. They can decide on getting a job, getting a loan, but also on the quality of healthcare or release from a prison. These are the areas where each machine error can have far-reaching consequences. And the consequences would be more serious, if these decisions were unfair or systematically harmed specific groups of the population.

How often and why do such situations really happen and what can their creators, but also as users, do with it? Is it at all human power to detect similar iniquities even if we are faced with advanced and, from a human point of view, AI algorithm? And how can trying to create fair and explainable artificial intelligence help us better understand our own prejudices and distortions?

Will try to answer the following questions:

  • How often and why do such situations really happen, and what can their creators, and also us – users, do with it?
  • Do we have the power to reveal such iniquities even when facing advanced, and too complicated AI algorithms?
  • And how can our effort to create fair and explainable AI help us understand our own prejudices and biases?

In this episode of our podcast, we’ll talk about how AI algorithms can replicate human errors and why it’s important to understand them properly. Our guest is Martin Tamajka, who deals with the analysis of medical image data and natural language processing. Together with his students, he also explores the methods of explainability of AI models so that they are more comprehensible to users.

The podcast is in Slovak.

You can read the English summary of the episode here.

About E-tika podcast

Digital and information technologies improve and simplify our lives. But they also raise new societal issues and challenges. We should discriminate between  the solutions that are technically possible and that are morally  good. Sometimes  we release a technology and only then we discover its effects on people and the society. But that may be too late. In the E-tika podcast we discuss with our guests the social and ethical dimensions of  digital technologies .

The E-tika podcast is produced by the multimedia center for contemporary culture, Nástupište 1-12, in cooperation with the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies. The project was supported from public funds by the “Fond na podporu umenia” fund.

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If you are interested in the topic, you can also listen to episodes of the previous season.