Events

CDS Seminar Series: Opportunities and Tensions for Fairness in AI & GenAI Systems

Speaker: Emily Black (CDS)

Location: 60 Fifth Avenue, Room 7th floor open space

Date: Friday, February 21, 2025

AI and GenAI models are now ubiquitous in decision-making in high-stakes domains from healthcare to employment. Unfortunately, both AI and GenAI systems have displayed bias on the basis of race, gender, income, and other attributes.  In certain domains-- particularly credit, housing, and employment---this bias is often illegal. While AI governance frameworks are rapidly evolving, some of the strongest tools we have to combat this kind of discrimination in the United States are civil rights laws dating back to the 1960s. However, crucially, much of the academic work in the AI fairness space comes into tension with these laws---potentially making several state of the art techniques to mitigate and even test for bias unusable in high stakes domains such as credit, housing, and employment. 

 

In this talk, I'll (1) illuminate these tensions between civil rights laws and AI debiasing methods as well as point out some technical insights into how to sidestep them, (2) demonstrate how these tensions have played out in practice in real-world high-stakes AI decision-making contexts such as fair lending, and (3) discuss some further, unique tensions to developing effective regulation to prevent AI harms for Generative AI systems.