By Reuters. Amazon.com Inc’s (AMZN.O) machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women.

The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters.

Automation has been key to Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company’s experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars – much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said.

“Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one of the people said. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.” (Read more from “Amazon Scraps Secret AI Recruiting Tool That Showed Bias Against Women” HERE)

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Amazon Built an AI Tool to Hire People but Had to Shut It Down Because It Was Discriminating Against Women

By Business Insider. . .A year later, however, the engineers reportedly noticed something troubling about their engine — it didn’t like women. This was apparently because the AI combed through predominantly male résumés submitted to Amazon over a 10-year period to accrue data about whom to hire.

Consequently, the AI concluded that men were preferable. It reportedly downgraded résumés containing the words “women’s” and filtered out candidates who had attended two women-only colleges.

Amazon’s engineers apparently tweaked the system to remedy these particular forms of bias but couldn’t be sure the AI wouldn’t find new ways to unfairly discriminate against candidates.

Gender bias was not the only problem, Reuters’ sources said. The computer programs also spat out candidates who were unqualified for the position.

Remedying algorithmic bias is a thorny issue, as algorithms can pick up on subconscious human bias. In 2016, ProPublica found that risk-assessment software used to forecast which criminals were most likely to reoffend exhibited racial bias against black people. Overreliance on AI for things like recruitment, credit-scoring, and parole judgments have also created issues in the past. (Read more from “Amazon Built an Ai Tool to Hire People but Had to Shut It Down Because It Was Discriminating Against Women” HERE)

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By The Daily Wire. Why would the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a non-profit, public interest law firm that fights for religious freedom, be ejected from AmazonSmile, Amazon’s program which takes a small part of a customer’s purchase and donates it to the nonprofit chosen by the customer?

Because Amazon partially depends on the radical left Southern Poverty Law Center to determine which groups should be eligible for the program, that’s why, according to ADF president Michael Farris. Farris composed a letter to Amazon in which he stated, “If you are going to rely on a discredited partisan organization like the SPLC to determine who is eligible to participate in AmazonSmile, you should disclose that in your policy and to your customers. Your customers have a right to know that you’ve placed such an organization as the gatekeeper to participation in a charitable program.” (Read more from “Amazon Now Removing Christian Organizations” HERE)

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Amazon Boots Christian Nonprofit from Donations Program Because of SPLC’s ‘Hate List’

By The Federalist. A non-profit, public interest law firm which focuses on religious freedom issues has been booted from AmazonSmile, after the Southern Poverty Law Center deemed the law firm a “hate group.”

In a statement released Thursday, Alliance for Defending Freedom President Michael Farris said the law firm has been excluded from the retail giant’s program, which donates a small portion of purchases to the nonprofit of the customer’s choice. Farris said the firm’s exclusion is the result of Amazon’s reliance upon SPLC, an organization that has long been regarded as a glorified direct-mail scam that profits from hate-mongering.

“If you are going to rely on a discredited partisan organization like the SPLC to determine who is eligible to participate in AmazonSmile, you should disclose that in your policy and to your customers,” Farris wrote in a letter to the retail giant. “Your customers have a right to know that you’ve placed such an organization as the gatekeeper to participation in a charitable program.” (Read more from “Amazon Boots Christian Nonprofit from Donations Program Because of SPLC’s ‘Hate List’” HERE)

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