Online retail giant Amazon announced that it has ditched its AI recruiting tool after its machine learning specialists uncovered that their new recruiting engine did not like women, reports The Guardian.  The machine learning specialists team, based in Edinburgh, had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ résumés, with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent. However, by 2015 the company realised its new system was preferring men over women when it came to rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts. They noticed that it was penalising CVs that included the word "women's," such as "women's chess club captain." It also reportedly downgraded graduates of two all-women's colleges. The system was trained on data submitted by people over a 10-year period, most of which came from men. The AI was tweaked in an attempt to fix the bias. However, last year, Amazon lost faith in its ability to be neutral and abandoned the project altogether. Amazon’s failure highlights a potential weakness of machine learning when it comes to recruitment.