Ethics and bias risk: Which category of AI risk does this best illustrate?
A model that systematically disadvantages a group by learning skewed historical patterns illustrates ethics and bias risk.
The question
A hiring model consistently scores qualified applicants from one demographic group lower because it learned from historical hiring data that favored another group. Which category of AI risk does this best illustrate?
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- Misalignment with objectives, where the deployed system pursues a goal that diverges from what its designers actually intended it to do.Plausible, since bias can relate to goals, but misalignment specifically means the system optimizes an unintended objective, not inherited discrimination.
- Ethics and bias risk, where the model reproduces unfair, discriminatory patterns present in the historical data that it was trained on. ✓Correct. Systematic unfair scoring learned from skewed history is the classic ethics-and-bias harm.
- Complexity and scalability risk, where a system becomes too large and interconnected for the organization to fully oversee and control.Plausible as a listed harm, but this scenario is about discriminatory outputs, not the challenge of governing scale.
- Data security risk, where sensitive training records are exposed to unauthorized parties through a breach of the model's environment.Incorrect; nothing here involves unauthorized access to data, only biased outcomes produced by the model.
The trap
Labeling discriminatory outputs as 'misalignment,' when misalignment refers to pursuing an unintended objective, not inheriting bias. How to remember it
A model that systematically disadvantages a group by learning skewed historical patterns illustrates ethics and bias risk.
How many of these would you get right?
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