AI’s Racial Bias Claims Tested in Court as US Regulations Lag

A lawsuit developing in the Midwest highlights an AI issue that continues to trip up companies and policymakers: how to stop algorithms fed race-free data from seeing color anyway.

“Where we live, what we do for a living, what type of activities we engage in, what we purchase, even our names all have correlations with race,” said Mark Dredze, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, and interim deputy director of the university’s data science and AI Institute.

“Not telling an algorithm a person’s race doesn’t prevent it from inferring that information from countless other things ...