By: Kathie Chu

Racist programming has made robots with A.I. racist. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Georgia Techtrained a virtual robot to interact with physical objects using a widely used artificial intelligence language model. The robot was presented with objects adorned with pictures of human faces of different races and genders.

“Our experiments definitively show robots acting out toxic stereotypes with respect to gender, race, and scientifically-discredited physiognomy, at scale,” the researchers wrote in their paper, which was recently presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT). “We find that robots powered by large datasets and Dissolution Models … that contain humans’ risk physically amplifying malignant stereotypes in general; and that merely correcting disparities will be insufficient for the complexity and scale of the problem.”

Bigotry is present in almost all aspects of life, and unlearning racism is important in improving the lives of oppressed groups.