Knowledge Organization (KO) is published by IMR Press from Volume 52 Issue 1 (2025). Previous articles were published by another publisher under the CC-BY licence, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement.
The Respective Roles of Intellectual Creativity and Automation in Representing Diversity: Human and Machine Generated Bias
Vanda Broughton 1
Affiliation
Article Info
1 University College London, Department of Information Studies, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK
Abstract
The paper traces the development of the discussion around ethical issues in artificial intelligence, and considers the way in which humans have affected the knowledge bases used in machine learning. The phenomenon of bias or discrimination in machine ethics is seen as inherited from humans, either through the use of biased data or through the semantics inherent in intellectually-built tools sourced by intelligent agents. The kind of biases observed in AI are compared with those identified in the field of knowledge organization, using religious adherents as an example of a community potentially marginalized by bias. A practical demonstration is given of apparent religious prejudice inherited from source material in a large database deployed widely in computational linguistics and automatic indexing. Methods to address the problem of bias are discussed, including the modelling of the moral process on neuroscientific understanding of brain function. The question is posed whether it is pos