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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Jessica Murray Social affairs correspondent

AI tools used by English councils downplay women’s health issues, study finds

An elderly woman being assisted by a care worker
AI tools are increasingly being used by local authorities to ease the workload of overstretched social workers. Photograph: Image Source/Alamy

Artificial intelligence tools used by more than half of England’s councils are downplaying women’s physical and mental health issues and risk creating gender bias in care decisions, research has found.

The study found that when using Google’s AI tool “Gemma” to generate and summarise the same case notes, language such as “disabled”, “unable” and “complex” appeared significantly more often in descriptions of men than women.

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