AI Biases as Asymmetries: A Review to Guide Practice

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Waters, Gabriella, Honenberger, Phillip
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Waters, Gabriella
Honenberger, Phillip
author_facet Waters, Gabriella
Honenberger, Phillip
contents The understanding of bias in AI is currently undergoing a revolution. Initially understood as errors or flaws, biases are increasingly recognized as integral to AI systems and sometimes preferable to less biased alternatives. In this paper, we review the reasons for this changed understanding and provide new guidance on two questions: First, how should we think about and measure biases in AI systems, consistent with the new understanding? Second, what kinds of bias in an AI system should we accept or even amplify, and what kinds should we minimize or eliminate, and why? The key to answering both questions, we argue, is to understand biases as "violations of a symmetry standard" (following Kelly). We distinguish three main types of asymmetry in AI systems-error biases, inequality biases, and process biases-and highlight places in the pipeline of AI development and application where bias of each type is likely to be good, bad, or inevitable.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_07326
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AI Biases as Asymmetries: A Review to Guide Practice
Waters, Gabriella
Honenberger, Phillip
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
The understanding of bias in AI is currently undergoing a revolution. Initially understood as errors or flaws, biases are increasingly recognized as integral to AI systems and sometimes preferable to less biased alternatives. In this paper, we review the reasons for this changed understanding and provide new guidance on two questions: First, how should we think about and measure biases in AI systems, consistent with the new understanding? Second, what kinds of bias in an AI system should we accept or even amplify, and what kinds should we minimize or eliminate, and why? The key to answering both questions, we argue, is to understand biases as "violations of a symmetry standard" (following Kelly). We distinguish three main types of asymmetry in AI systems-error biases, inequality biases, and process biases-and highlight places in the pipeline of AI development and application where bias of each type is likely to be good, bad, or inevitable.
title AI Biases as Asymmetries: A Review to Guide Practice
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.07326