  Web search engines influence perception of social reality by filtering and
ranking information. However, their outputs are often subjected to bias that
can lead to skewed representation of subjects such as professional occupations
or gender. In our paper, we use a mixed-method approach to investigate presence
of race and gender bias in representation of artificial intelligence (AI) in
image search results coming from six different search engines. Our findings
show that search engines prioritize anthropomorphic images of AI that portray
it as white, whereas non-white images of AI are present only in non-Western
search engines. By contrast, gender representation of AI is more diverse and
less skewed towards a specific gender that can be attributed to higher
awareness about gender bias in search outputs. Our observations indicate both
the the need and the possibility for addressing bias in representation of
societally relevant subjects, such as technological innovation, and emphasize
the importance of designing new approaches for detecting bias in information
retrieval systems.
