AI industry faces diversity ‘crisis,’ study says

The artificial intelligence (AI) industry is facing a diversity “crisis,” and the mostly-white and mostly-male workforce could be creating AI products that perpetuate discrimination, according to a new study published on Tuesday. 

Researchers with New York University’s AI Now Institute found that the industry faces a dearth of women, and employs even fewer people of color. Only 15 percent of the AI research staff at Facebook are women, compared to 10 percent of the staff at Google. And only 2.5 percent of Google’s workforce is black, compared to 4 percent at Facebook and Microsoft.

{mosads}”To date, the diversity problems of the AI industry and the issues of bias in the systems it builds have tended to be considered separately,” the researchers wrote. “But we suggest that these are two versions of the same problem: issues of discrimination in the workforce and in system building are deeply intertwined.”

The study published Tuesday was the result of a year of research by AI Now Institute’s Sarah Myers West, Meredith Whittaker and Kate Crawford. 

Their research emerges as the tech industry increasingly contends with the issue of AI’s potentially discriminatory effects. In recent years, research has shown that everything from algorithms on Facebook to facial recognition technology produced by Amazon can discriminate against minorities, women and other protected groups.

The researchers with AI Now are arguing that the field must funnel resources into attracting a more diverse workforce, or else they could perpetuate the biases of the mostly white, mostly male researchers behind the sensitive technologies being produced at Google, Microsoft, Facebook and universities around the world.

“Despite many decades of ‘pipeline studies’ that assess the flow of diverse job candidates from school to industry, there has been no substantial progress in diversity in the AI industry,” they wrote.