Amazon’s attempt at automating its hiring process with Artificial Intelligence was abandoned after a glitch in the programming caused it to discriminate against hiring women. Amazon set up a software engineering firm in Edinburgh, Scotland, to develop the AI software to streamline hiring practices.
Amazon wanted the program to automatically find the best candidates based on resumes, and pick them out to save time and money. But while the software team tried for years to correct a problem in the programming, they had been unsuccessful in keeping the AI from picking men over women. While the program is now used for certain administrative tasks, the hiring aspect of it was never fully utilized and the team was dispersed last year.
The reason behind the AI’s problem with picking female candidates can be chalked up to the input it received. AI works by using information that it is given to formulate a pattern, so certain unseen factors have the potential to pop up and become problems later on.
The program was fed with resumes of candidates who had been hired over the past 10 years, and most of them had been men. The problem was in all likelihood the program assumed that certain words should be associated with avoiding certain candidates.
It is unlikely the public will truly know what exactly was going on with the program, because of its discontinuation and the overall bad public relations this kind of news can bring. But it is more than likely that this AI’s discriminatory practices were oversights, and Amazon and the engineering team that developed it had no intention on favoring men against women. Perhaps the best way of hiring people will have to remain person to person for the time being.
