Navigating the muddy waters of bias in artificial intelligence research: Understanding divergent meanings and conceptions

As artificial intelligence (AI) pervades many decision-making domains, AI bias grows in importance. Although there is increasing awareness of the social and ethical consequences of biased AI, understanding bias from the perspective of those who develop these systems, such as the AI research community, is less clear. In this study, we employ topic modeling on 6520 articles to explore how the AI research community interprets the concept of bias. Our results show that the definition of bias is dispersed and complex within the community, often exhibiting even divergent conceptions (some even view and introduce bias as a tunable statistical parameter rather than an undesirable issue). The research community as a whole needs to engage more effectively with the concept of bias and establish a more cohesive understanding of it. We specifically argue that, although some sub-communities view bias as an issue that can be captured and mitigated through technical, computational, or statistical methods, it is not solely a technical problem. It instead involves contextual, social, and ethical factors that require broader sociotechnical perspectives and solutions.