How Adobe's Ethics Committee Helps Manage AI Bias
May 05 2021 - 9:16PM
Dow Jones News
By Jared Council
Review boards can help companies mitigate some of the risks
associated with using artificial intelligence, according to Adobe
Inc. executive Dana Rao.
Mr. Rao, Adobe's general counsel, said one of the top risks in
using AI systems is that the technology can perpetuate harmful bias
against certain demographics, based on what it learns from data.
Ethics committees can be one way of managing those risks and
putting organizational values into practice.
Adobe's AI ethics committee, launched two years ago, has been
able to review new features for potential bias before those
features are deployed, Mr. Rao said Wednesday at The Wall Street
Journal's Risk & Compliance Forum. The committee is made up of
employees of various ethnicities and genders from different parts
of the company, including legal, government relations and
marketing.
"It takes a lot of people across your company to help figure
this out," he said. "Sometimes we might look at it and say there's
not an issue here," he said, but getting a diverse group of people
together can help identify issues product developers might
miss.
A feature designed to detect unauthorized purchases of Abode
software, for instance, could inadvertently learn to block
customers of a certain demographic, he said.
Mr. Rao said the AI ethics committee recently reviewed a
fraud-detection feature that could potentially discriminate against
certain groups.
"[AI] can learn from last names and geographies and make a
connection that...there's a lot more credit card fraud coming from
Brazil," Mr. Rao said. "And it may not just stop people from Brazil
coming in, which would be bad. It might stop people with Brazilian
names from [purchasing] the software."
He said the committee directed the team proposing the feature to
conduct further testing.
Mr. Rao said an AI ethics assessment is one mechanism for
identifying which features Adobe's ethics committee should review.
This is a form product developers fill out that spells out what the
AI feature will do and how it works.
If the assessment review shows no major ethical AI risks, such
as an AI tool that recommends text font, then the team behind it
doesn't need to present the feature to the board for review, he
said.
It's also important for the review board to be made up of
diverse voices, he said.
"We've had examples where some African-American members on our
committee have spotted issues in an imaging AI filter that no one
else did, because it affected only people with Black skin or their
hair specifically and no one else would have gotten the issue."
Write to Jared Council at jared.council@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 05, 2021 21:01 ET (01:01 GMT)
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