Opinion by: Rob Viglione, co-founder and CEO of Horizen Labs
Can you trust your AI to be unbiased? A recent research paper suggests it’s a little more complicated. Unfortunately, bias isn’t just a bug — it’s a persistent feature without proper cryptographic guardrails.
A September 2024 study from Imperial College London shows how zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) can help companies verify that their machine learning (ML) models treat all demographic groups equally while still keeping model details and user data private.
Zero-knowledge proofs are cryptographic methods that enable one party to prove to another that a statement is true without revealing any additional information beyond the statement’s validity. When defining “fairness,” however, we open up a whole new can of worms.
Machine learning bias
With machine learning models, bias manifests in dramatically different ways. It can cause a credit scoring service to rate a person differently