As AI technology becomes more integrated into the real estate industry, it’s important for professionals to ensure that their use of AI is ethical and transparent. One potential concern is the potential for AI algorithms to perpetuate existing biases and discrimination, particularly with regard to issues like race, gender, and socioeconomic status.
How can real estate professionals ensure that their use of AI is ethical and transparent?
This is an excellent question David (and one that likely has many complex facets in terms of an answer)
For us at Real Estate Webmasters, we have taken the position that “human audited/assisted AI” is the only way to use it “right now”.
Technology is SO COOL! (And the answers very impressive) but when the output relied upon is a commentary and not fact-based than the potential for learning bias clearly exists.
How we are tackling this is providing “human assisted AI” - meaning, we review any content we leverage AI to produce for ourselves and on behalf of our clients, but to be honest, we had not put this element as part of our official review (though I would hope our people would watch for it).
I’m definitely going to add this to our guidelines as I think it’s important (screenfor discrimination or bias in the output). @AidanC a great suggestion here!
I think one could argue that social media is currently perpetuating those biases and discrimination in the real estate industry. I believe social media itself has the potential to be more detrimental, there is no policing of real estate on social media(at least in the US)… There is still a standard that needs to be upheld by individual agents/brokers before publishing any content about a listing on the national and state levels and most listing syndicate through the MLS which are regulated.
Could you elaborate on this? What are some ways that social media is perpetuating bias in real estate?