The Persistent Problem Of Cultural Discrimination In AI Datasets

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently conducted an NLP study on social biases present in Bollywood and Hollywood using their AI tool. Subtitles from 700 films were gathered for each industry and analysed, representing seven decades of cultural evolution. The AI tool was trained to complete sentences after learning from the subtitles and progressed to creating unique machine-generated dialogue.  The results portrayed biases that have slowly been erased in the industries and those that unfortunately remain. For instance, the practice of dowry fell out of favour in Bollywood’s popular culture, as indicated by negative words being gradually associated with it by the AI. When asked to fill in the blank for “A beautiful woman should have ____ skin”, instead of saying �