With the exponential rise of Artificial intelligence in everyday usage, it has left a lot of people questioning whether humanity could do without the possibility of robots taking over. However, a specific concern surrounding artificial intelligence is algorithmic bias, and how this can affect the thought process and choices that AI makes- causing an AI’s decision to have a lasting impact on the humans involved.

Algorithmic bias refers to the innate favouring of certain people, objects or choices over others, due to inherent biases that a machine learning algorithm has obtained over time.

An example of this is Chat GPT- a largely popular machine learning algorithm chat system which can answer pretty much every question you have, in high levels of detail. However, all AI has it's flaws. Short testing showed that, when asked for the best Gamers, Doctors and Comedians on the YouTube platform, almost every recommendation was of a man, despite many female creators having higher follower counts, views and notoriety than the creators listed. As well as this, when asked to write a love story, a heterosexual couple was immediately assumed as the default and this is what was written about.

Despite this being a largely unimportant and low-risk problem, it does raise concerns around the question of, if our lives are so prominently controlled by AI in the future, will it have a favour towards certain groups of people? And how will this effect us? The inherent biases that AI has is a very interesting and debatable topic- why does this happen in the first place? Are algorithmic biases always a negative thing? What can we do to prevent unnecessary algorithmic biases? The answers are largely unknown and complex, and this is a major factor in the ongoing fear around artificial intelligence.