Automated decision making and Australian discrimination law

Automated Decision Making (ADM) or Data Driven Inferencing (DDI) may include traditional rule-based systems, algorithms or ‘more specialised systems which use automated tools to predict and deliberate, including through the use of machine learning.’⁴ Training data sets guide the automated systems to ‘learn’ to apply the data they analyse to come to a decision.⁵ But training data ‘can be susceptible to subconscious cultural biases’⁶ especially if developers and designers do not intentionally incorporate diverse perspectives.⁷ Large scale Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are ‘developed almost exclusively in a handful of technology companies and a small set of elite university laboratories, spaces that in the West tend to be disproportionately white, affluent, technically oriented, and male.’⁸ This risks perpetuating biases and discriminatory outcomes⁹ , raising broader questions about transparency, accountability and systemic disadvantage.