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JMIR Publications, JMIR Medical Education, (9), p. e51494, 2023

DOI: 10.2196/51494

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Can AI Mitigate Bias in Writing Letters of Recommendation?

Journal article published in 2023 by Tiffany I. Leung ORCID, Ankita Sagar ORCID, Swati Shroff ORCID, Tracey L. Henry ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Letters of recommendation play a significant role in higher education and career progression, particularly for women and underrepresented groups in medicine and science. Already, there is evidence to suggest that written letters of recommendation contain language that expresses implicit biases, or unconscious biases, and that these biases occur for all recommenders regardless of the recommender’s sex. Given that all individuals have implicit biases that may influence language use, there may be opportunities to apply contemporary technologies, such as large language models or other forms of generative artificial intelligence (AI), to augment and potentially reduce implicit biases in the written language of letters of recommendation. In this editorial, we provide a brief overview of existing literature on the manifestations of implicit bias in letters of recommendation, with a focus on academia and medical education. We then highlight potential opportunities and drawbacks of applying this emerging technology in augmenting the focused, professional task of writing letters of recommendation. We also offer best practices for integrating their use into the routine writing of letters of recommendation and conclude with our outlook for the future of generative AI applications in supporting this task.