[local_yokel]

It's worth pointing out that the original ProPublica investigation was conducted by journalists unskilled in statistics and machine learning. There was a convincing rebuttal posted by the actual scientists involved, which is of course ignored since "racist AI" is the kind of headline that's just too golden to abandon.

http://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/80_2_6_0.pdf

[Bartweiss]

ProPublica's work on algorithmic bias has all seemed well below their usual standards. I haven't followed this rebuttal, but their work showing racism in car insurance pricing was heavily criticized, and while the authors defended the work it looked to me like they picked only the weakest criticisms to respond to.

(In the insurance case, ProPublica attempted to compare areas with comparable crash frequencies and show that rates were higher in poor and minority areas. But the data they had was moving accidents, especially with injuries, and the data they didn't have was stuff like "rate of car break-ins" and "odds of being hit by an uninsured driver". Which you would obviously expect to vary by region even when serious-injury accidents don't.)

[conanbatt]

> racist AI" is the kind of headline that's just too golden to abandon.

TBF there is at least one leading ML scientist that has made a huge narrative on discriminating AI, particularly against women.