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Using bigger AI training data sets may produce more racist results

Contrary to Silicon Valley wisdom, training AIs on larger data sets could worsen their tendency to replicate societal biases and racist stereotypes

By Jeremy Hsu

13 July 2023

91av. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Larger training sets don’t reduce bias in artificial intelligence

Shutterstock/wutzkohphoto

Many tech companies have operated under the assumption that training artificial intelligence on more data can help fix the ongoing problem of AIs replicating human prejudices. But a study has found that AIs trained on increasingly larger data sets can produce even more racist results.

at the Mozilla Foundation and her colleagues compared two data sets provided by the Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION), a non-profit that offers open-source data sets for AI training. One contained 400 million samples and the other had 2 billion samples,…

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