How AI bias compounds without anyone noticing

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]How do we train machines to see? How is AI applied to something like facial recognition? So, I started to look at the data sets and what I found were there were so many pale male data sets.

[00:00:11]So, a data set that was supposed to represent all of humanity might be 70% male label faces and 80% lighterkinned faces. And so I started to realize that the very data fueling the vision of the world for AI systems didn't actually reflect the world as is. And that's where the data bias starts to creep in.

[00:00:34]And then you start to see it show up in terms of the outputs of different AI systems. That was back in 2017 when I started this research before we got to generative AI systems. So now we've seen that's gone even further because then what is created can also inherit that bias. So essentially any bias that society has held at some point in time and AI is training from that data that is going to appear or even be exacerbated in how that AI system performs or in the output of those AI systems.