Fairness and Bias in Artificial Intelligence: A Brief Survey of Sources, Impacts, and Mitigation Strategies

The significant advancements in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to healthcare decision-making, medical diagnosis, and other domains have simultaneously raised concerns about the fairness and bias of AI systems. This is particularly critical in areas like healthcare, employment, criminal justice, credit scoring, and increasingly, in generative AI models (GenAI) that produce synthetic media. Such systems can lead to unfair outcomes and perpetuate existing inequalities, including generative biases that affect the representation of individuals in synthetic data. This survey study offers a succinct, comprehensive overview of fairness and bias in AI, addressing their sources, impacts, and mitigation…