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Do Humans Prefer Debiased AI Algorithms? A Case Study in Career Recommendation

Currently, there is a surge of interest in fair Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) research which aims to mitigate discriminatory bias in AI algorithms, e.g. along lines of gender, age, and race. While most research in this domain focuses on developing fair AI algorithms, in this work, we examine the challenges which arise when human- fair-AI interact. Our results show that due to an apparent conflict between human preferences and fairness, a fair AI algorithm on its own may be insufficient to achieve its intended results in the real world. Using college major recommendation as a case study, we build a fair AI recommender by employing gender debiasing machine learning techniques. Our offline evaluation showed that the debiased recommender makes fairer and more accurate college major recommendations. Nevertheless, an online user study of more than 200 college students revealed that participants on average prefer the original biased system over the debiased system. Specifically, we found that the perceived gender disparity associated with a college major is a determining factor for the acceptance of a recommendation. In other words, our results demonstrate we cannot fully address the gender bias issue in AI recommendations without addressing the gender bias in humans. They also highlight the urgent need to extend the current scope of fair AI research from narrowly focusing on debiasing AI algorithms to including new persuasion and bias explanation technologies in order to achieve intended societal impacts.