Recently, Caliskan and colleagues published a paper in Science, that finds as a computer teaches itself English, it becomes prejudiced against black Americans and women.Basically, they used a common machine learning program to crawl through the internet, look at 840 billion words, and teach itself the definitions of those words. The program accomplishes this by looking for how often certain words appear in the same sentence. Take the word “bottle.” The computer begins to understand what the word means by noticing it occurs more frequently alongside the word “container,” and also near words that connote liquids like “water” or “milk.”
Source: How artificial intelligence learns to be racist – Vox
