Artificial intelligence inherits human bias, reinforcing gender stereotypes
Artificial intelligence inherits human bias, reinforcing gender stereotypes
https://www.ynetnews.com/tech-and-digital/article/by9yftlemg
Publish Date: 2026-05-29 04:49:00
Source Domain: www.ynetnews.com
In recent years we were taught to fear the day when artificial intelligence would replace humans. But while the world is busy asking whether AI will take our jobs, another question is barely being asked: who exactly is teaching machines what the world is supposed to look like?
Because when an AI system automatically translates “doctor” as male and “nurse” as female, struggles to recognize female faces (not to mention Black women’s faces), or makes decisions based on biased human data, it is not really creating a new world. It is simply taking our old biases, repackaging them in code and returning them with a stamp of technological “objectivity.”
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Who exactly is teaching machines what the world is supposed to look like?
(Illustration: Shutterstock)
The big question is not only why this happens but whether it can even be stopped. This is no longer just a question of who gets promoted and who is left behind. It is a question of who is building the systems that increasingly make decisions for us, what data they learn from, what assumptions they replicate, and who can even understand what is happening inside that black box.
Dr. Gayle Gilboa-Freedman, head of the Faculty of Technology at Sapir Academic College and an artificial intelligence researcher, does not try to soften the picture. In her view, the discussion about gender bias in AI is only the tip of the iceberg. “We are in a loss of control around the entire issue of AI, and it is also reflected in the gender context,” she says.
“When you ask AI to write a CV for a man and a woman for example, the answers are different. Or if you ask it to identify male or female faces, there are more errors when it comes to female faces. Now take that into airport security for example, and you have a serious problem.”
A simpler example comes from language itself. Gilboa-Freedman says she asked ChatGPT to translate two English sentences: “The doctor gave me medicine” and “The nurse cleaned…
