Any sort of image search is going to tend to be biased toward stock photos, because those images are well labeled, and often created to match things people search for.
Key point right there. Unless Google is deliberately injecting racial and/or gender bias into their code, which seems extremely far fetched (to put it kindly), the real fault lies with us humans and what we choose to publish on the web.
Nurses it's 34 women to 5 men. Proportions of skin tones are what I'd expect to see in a city in my country.
I would contend that society is biased. There is no evidence that says men are better doctors than women, and in fact what little this has been studied says that women make better doctors than men (and is reflected in the more recent med school graduation classes which are majority women).
So it's a question of what you are asking for when you search for [doctor]. Are you asking for a statistical sampling or are you asking for a set of exemplars?
> So statistically, it would be correct to return mostly male doctors in an image search.
And that's exactly it. The AI has no morality. It's doing exactly what it should, and is amplifying our existing biases.
You can blame statistics for that. Beyond that, you can blame genetics for slightly skewing the gender ratios of certain fields and human social behavior to amplify this gap to an extreme degree.
IMO, wrapping it in a concept like "morality" because the pictures have people in them just serves to excuse the problem and obscure its (otherwise obvious) solution.
Unless things have really changed, [doctor] will be mostly white men and [nurse] will be mostly white and Filipino women.
But don't blame the AI. The AI has no morality. It simply reflects and amplifies the morality of the data it was given.
And in this case the data is the entirety of human knowledge that Google knows about.
So really you can't blame anyone but society for having such deeply engrained biases.
The question to ask is does the programmer of the AI have a moral obligation to change the answer, and if so, guided by whose morality?