March 5, 2024
While artificial intelligence made headlines with ChatGPT, behind the scenes, the technology has quietly pervaded everyday life — screening job resumes, rental apartment applications, and even determining medical care in some cases.
While a number of AI systems have been found to discriminate, tipping the scales in favor of certain races, genders or incomes, there’s scant government oversight.
Lawmakers in at least seven states are taking big legislative swings to regulate bias in artificial intelligence, filling a void left by Congress’ inaction. These proposals are some of the first steps in a decades-long discussion over balancing the benefits of this nebulous new technology with the widely documented risks.
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“If you are letting the AI learn from decisions that existing managers have historically made, and if those decisions have historically favored some people and disfavored others, then that’s what the technology will learn,” said Christine Webber, the attorney in a class-action lawsuit alleging that an AI system scoring rental applicants discriminated against those who were Black or Hispanic.
Court documents describe one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, Mary Louis, a Black woman, applied to rent an apartment in Massachusetts and received a cryptic response: “The third-party service we utilize to screen all prospective tenants has denied your tenancy.”
When Louis submitted two landlord references to show she’d paid rent early or on time for 16 years, court records say, she received another reply: “Unfortunately, we do not accept appeals and cannot override the outcome of the Tenant Screening.”