Author: Mattieu Leroux, AI Sales Lead, UiPath
As AI further advances, it’s important ethical considerations and our collective intelligence are implemented as part of its innovation. As AI technology is adopted across a wide pool of industries, reshaping how they operate, now is the time to take stock of the impact AI will also have on society.
Although AI presents a significant number of benefits to productivity, disadvantages remain. One of the biggest challenges though is that AI models are trained on vast quantities of public data which presents a greater risk of strengthening existing biases in training data. As such, developers of frontier models must act now to ensure they create inclusive and ethical AI.
Ethical guides are not always at hand for developers to abide by, making it difficult to eradicate existing biases. Google’s Gemini was widely criticised for generating illogical outputs as a direct result of teams attempting to eliminate biases in training data. Yet, this is only one example of a far wider issue – there is no consensus over what ethical and inclusive AI should look like, let alone how to achieve it.
In the development stage of AI, a strong place to start would be to consider different viewpoints and unique experiences of neurodivergent individuals. Only 31% of people with autism in the UK are employed, but, on average, these employees are 30% more productive, meaning they could bring valuable skills to AI innovation.
Neurodiverse skills for AI development
Many neurodivergent individuals have enhanced pattern recognition capabilities and an exceptional attention to detail, which uniquely lends them to developer work. An example of this is data cleaning, where incorrect, incompatible, corrupted, or duplicated data needs to be scrubbed from training datasets. Neurodiverse people can spot subtle patterns that indicate erroneous data, promoting accurate performance.
However, the contribution of neurodiverse people to AI development should not be limited to just data related work. It’s estimated that 20-50% of those working in the UK’s creative industries are neurodiverse. Creative problem solving is an imperative skill for developing sophisticated algorithms that can recognise complex patterns or designing models to adapt to situations for which they have not been trained. Neurodiversity sometimes brings the ability to think outside the box, making neurodiverse people particularly helpful for these kinds of tasks.
The importance of diverse perspectives in creating an inclusive AI
The unique perspectives of neurodiverse people are necessary to ensure the widest group of people possible can benefit from AI systems. Neurodivergent people can provide insightful feedback on the accessibility of AI tools in addition to contributing to their development. From this, developers can tune models to be more accessible and intuitive to a diverse range of end users.
This feedback also has the potential to improve the emotional intelligence of AI systems. The reality is, neurodiverse people are often underrepresented in training data – for large language models, for example, social media data is often used. However, neurominorities are far less likely to use social media compared with neurotypical people, leading to an absence of diverse data available to train AI models. Including neurodiverse people in both AI development and testing rounds is necessary to maximise inclusivity.
How can AI be harnessed to bring societal change Neurodivergent people make up 15-22% of the world’s population, but less than a third of them find employment in the UK. This is partially due to hiring discrimination, but a significant problematic development in recent years has been AI recruitment systems screening out neurodiverse people. The biases which already exist in businesses today – such as the notion that someone who struggles to maintain eye contact is disinterested – have been amplified by these systems.
It’s crucial to remember, AI picking up negative stereotypes is also evidence it can pick up positive and accurate representations too. Promoting the employment of neurodiverse individuals will, ultimately, have a positive impact on society and integrating these people into the economy means they can live more fulfilling lives. With the rise of AI in recruitment there is an opportunity to circumvent the biases hiring managers have against neurodiverse people. By training models to not discriminate against common neurodiverse behaviours and habits at the interview stage, its less of a challenge to bring them into the world of work.
Diversity as a productivity enhancer
Some companies are already aware of the benefits hiring neurodiverse people can bring. Microsoft, for example, runs its own neurodiverse hiring program, and JP Morgan, through its ‘Autism at Work’ programme, found that, for certain technical positions, neurodiverse people can be 90-140% more productive than employees who had been working for ten years.
The unique skills and perspectives neurodiverse people bring can also stimulate innovation and creativity within teams. Integrating neurodivergence doesn’t just mean reinforcing inclusivity – it means reinforcing productivity.
Neurodiverse input is crucial for AI advancement
As AI systems become increasingly integrated in our everyday lives, it’s imperative we recognise the opportunities they give to neurodiverse individuals as well as the benefits of their contributions. However, for us to achieve artificial general intelligence or systems capable of surpassing human cognition, it is essential neurominorities, alongside neurotypical perspectives, are included in every part of the process.