Using Psychoanalysis to Understand and Address AI Bias

In Using Psychoanalysis to Understand and Address AI Bias: Refractions in the Digital Mirror, Karyne E. Messina uses a psychoanalytic lens to explore the subconscious forces driving AI development. This book provides a unique psychoanalytic framework for understanding how AI systems internalize and amplify the unconscious biases of their human creators. Through detailed case studies in clinical healthcare, predictive policing, and automated hiring, Messina introduces concepts such as projection, splitting and projective identification. She illustrates how these psychological mechanisms - originally developed to explain human behavior - are inadvertently built into the logic of AI, creating systems that replicate societal inequities on a massive scale. Using Psychoanalysis to Understand and Address AI Bias will be of interest to all readers interested in how AI can benefit from psychoanalytic insight, including psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and academics and scholars of AI ethics and technology policy.