Beware of Bias in AI!

I recently updated my website to include three courses I teach.  To make the page interesting, I wanted fun images to represent the courses.  I used old-school creativity to design those images.  However, a friend challenged me to try AI to see what images would be generated.  So I did and this post is about the results.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is in the news every day, every where.  Google rolled out Bard, Microsoft enhanced Bing to include AI-powered searches, and there's Chat GPT by OpenAI, just to name a few.  As a society, we seem enamored with the idea of a machine being able to "think" and replace the mundane tasks we humans do, or perhaps provide inspiration when we've hit a creative wall.  However, along with the excitement of new technology, there's the concern about the negative impacts of AI.  

First there are the ethics of passing off work generated by AI as our own.  This is especially risky in fields such an engineering where precise and correct design calculations, drawings, and specifications must be produced to ensure the safety and reliability of our designs.  There's also the ethical issue facing students who use AI to "help" write a term paper.  Is the student losing learning opportunities when they use AI?  Is the term paper violating plagiarism guidelines when using AI?  And there's also the issue of AI replacing tasks that are often done by entry-level individuals to hone their craft.  Don't our coders lose important learning when simple coding is left to computers rather than entry-level humans?  Don't engineers forego an opportunity to learn design and CAD skills if a computer does those tasks?

Another real concern, and the reason I'm writing this post, is unconscious bias.  AI works by combing through a universe of data to provide text or graphic answers to our queries.  The problem is that the universe of data has built-in biases which reflect the human unconscious biases we all share.  Which brings me to the quest for images for my project management classes.  I used Bing AI and entered "project management fundamentals course" and below are the four images I got back.

It appears that Bing thinks project management fundamentals are only for young white men.  There is a profile image of one woman who looks rather confused by this whole idea of project management, hopefully the guy will explain it to her.  Being dismayed with these results, I tried again with a different search: "project management leaders"

This time the images showed a few women and a surprisingly large proportion of Asians, but no Black or Brown people.  And no one who looks a day over 30 years old.

We already live in a world full of sexism, racism, and ageism.  AI use runs the risk of perpetuating those "isms".  That's the insidious nature of unconscious bias -- it's unconscious!  And to overcome these biases, we need sentient, thinking beings to consciously be more inclusive in the imagery we use.  If you can see it, you can be it!  So for now, I will stick to my own creative juices when generating images for my website.