UnBias-Plus AI tool detects and rewrites bias in text

[Alies Maybee]

Interesting tool developed by the Vector Institute, Canada. Take a read: UnBias-Plus AI tool detects and rewrites bias in text

[Debra Turnbull]

@Alies-Maybee

Yeah, I read that this morning... !

Very cool! and there's a free public version!

Has HUGE implications in training data for AI-Scribes. Hopefully with this we can get the Canadian version of datasets...

Now, to work on the Consent component. Exciting times!

[Debra Turnbull]

For those of you that want to test out the free version:

• UnBias-Plus

[Chris Johnston]

@Debra-Turnbull @Alies-Maybee

It’s an interesting tool for sure, and I can see it being useful in various ways. But perhaps mostly as a teaching tool to help students tone down at least the more obvious forms of bias in their writing. Again in a teaching context, the concern would be does it weaken the development of critical thinking? If students rely on a tool that identifies a subset of biased language, can they still be taught to recognize more subtle ingrained biases? It’s arguable whether that’s actually happening now, though it should be.

Deb, I’m interested in your comment about getting the “Canadian version” of datasets using this tool. Can you elaborate on that a little? What kind of datasets in particular and how this tool would be used in that context?

[Debra Turnbull]

@Chris-Johnston

So, much like the Ethical use of AI project (the one we were both on), bias gets automatically built in to AI systems = because they are fed biased input... especially AI-Scribes. The one example that comes to mind is: "Combative patient refuses to take medication" as opposed to "Patient refuses to take medication". The output decision of an AI gets skewed.

If Canada is going to produce its own training datasets, it would be good to clean up the clinician notes set that would act as input. Flag the biases and remove or re-classify them (not sure what this would look like). This increases the value of the data.

So now, I have one for you.
You mentioned training students - but which students? Med students and writing up physician-notes? How does this benefit high school students? Isn't bias under the guise of "creative writing"?

[Chris Johnston]

@Debra-Turnbull

It would certainly be an interesting research project to run a broad sample of clinical notes through the tool and see how much bias it picks up and at what severity.

Equally it would be very interesting to see what it misses, but that would be much harder to quantify of course.

In terms of students, I was thinking broadly of higher ed, not just medical or health sciences. Though I suppose it could be used at high school level as well.

As a poet, science fiction and memoir writer, the comment 'Isn't bias under the guise of creative writing?' really made me giggle. Yes - absolutely - but only in so much as all human communication (and all human thought for that matter) are also prone to bias And while this tool only gets at a tiny portion of it - even that tiny portion could be used to raise awareness of the ways in which bias is encoded not just in everything we say, but how we say it And once you start to see it, it can be difficult to unsee it.