AI Associate Ethical Considerations of AI Practice Question
A healthcare provider uses an AI model to predict patient readmission risk. The model is trained on historical data that underrepresents minority populations. What is the MOST significant ethical risk?
⚠ Common exam trap
Salesforce often tests the distinction between a technical symptom (like overfitting) and the core ethical consequence (like biased predictions), so candidates may incorrectly choose overfitting as the most significant risk instead of recognizing that the ethical harm to minorities is the primary concern.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
The model may produce biased predictions against minorities
Training on historical data that underrepresents minority populations leads to a model that has insufficient examples to learn patterns for those groups, resulting in biased predictions that systematically disadvantage minorities. This is a direct violation of fairness in AI ethics, as the model's outputs will be less accurate or equitable for underrepresented groups, potentially causing harm in critical healthcare decisions like readmission risk assessment.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The model may overfit to the majority population
Why it's wrong here
Overfitting is a technical problem, not an ethical one.
- ✗
The model cannot scale to real-time predictions
Why it's wrong here
Scalability is a performance concern, not ethical.
- ✓
The model may produce biased predictions against minorities
Why this is correct
Underrepresentation in training data causes algorithmic bias, an ethical risk.
- ✗
The model lacks explainability
Why it's wrong here
Explainability is relevant but secondary to bias in this scenario.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AI Associate practice question is part of Courseiva's free Salesforce certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the AI Associate exam.