When AI Systems Try to deal with bias they encounter an underlying truth: no one's perceptions are wholly true. Tackling that starts with ourselves

Think of a doctor or a lawyer. If what comes to mind is the image of a white man, does that show your unconscious bias or does it simply reflect a social reality?

This week the market value of Google’s holding company dropped by ninety billion dollars when they withdrew the Gemini AI image creation service amid accusations of ‘wokery’ and bias. AI systems like Gemini learn to represent people by analysing images uploaded to the web. But as these reflect social inequalities, the developers had built in an algorithm that told Gemini to include greater diversity. But it overcompensated, and there was uproar when it did things like represent America’s white Founding Fathers as black men or women.

AI reflects the world that produced it, and the episode reflects the world’s culture wars: one side challenges our idea of what’s normal and the other furiously protests that an alternative version of reality is being forced on them. It’s hard to resolve because, without always being aware of it, we all see the world through a veil of what psychologists term cognitive biases. The filter bubbles and echo chambers of social media simply magnify a natural human tendency.

The oldest version of a well known parable showing the conundrum comes from the Buddhist scriptures. A king asks a group of blind men to feel an elephant and tell him what it looks like. Those who touch the head say, ‘It's like a pot.' Those who hold the ear say, ‘It's like a basket.' Those who feel the foot say ’It’s like a pillar.’ Each insists that theirs is the only correct interpretation and they soon begin to fight.

The story’s sometimes cited as an argument for relativism: the view that no belief is true. But in the original there really is an elephant and the king can see it plainly. We don’t need to to discard the notion of truth altogether to recognise that our understanding is limited. 

For Buddhists, perceiving the world less subjectively and more truthfully is a practice, something we can learn by getting to know our minds. That’s what mindfulness means in Buddhism: separating our awareness from our thoughts so we can see things just as they are. However complex social conflicts become, I think the starting point is recognising how the same tendencies play out in our own lives, in our minds and in this moment.