Zillow (NASDAQ: Z and ZG) is releasing its open-source Fair Housing Classifier, which establishes guardrails to promote responsible and unbiased behavior in real estate conversations powered by large language model (LLM) technology.
The Fair Housing Classifier acts as “a protective measure, to encourage more equitable conversations with AI technology.”
It detects questions that could lead “to discriminatory responses about legally protected groups in real estate experiences, such as search or chatbots.”
Many AI tools disregard fair housing requirements and, “when deployed, can perpetuate bias and undermine the progress achieved in advocating for fair housing.”
Zillow’s Fair Housing Classifier focuses “on mitigating the risk of illegal steering — the practice of influencing a buyer’s choice of communities based upon the buyer’s legally protected characteristics under federal law.”
Josh Weisberg, senior vice president of Artificial Intelligence, said:
“Since 2006, Zillow has used AI to bring transparency to home shoppers, powering tools like the Zestimate. We’ve made it our business to increase transparency in real estate — open sourcing this classifier demonstrates that advancements in technology do not need to come at the expense of equity and fairness for consumers. We’re offering free and easy access so that others in civil rights, tech and real estate sectors can use it, collaborate and help improve it.”
The Fair Housing Classifier acts as “a protective measure, to encourage more equitable conversations with AI technology.”
It detects questions that could lead “to discriminatory responses about legally protected groups in real estate experiences, such as search or chatbots.”
The classifier identifies instances of noncompliance in “the input or the output, leaving the decision of how to intervene in the hands of system developers.”
Michael Akinwumi, Ph.D., chief responsible AI officer at the National Fair Housing Alliance said:
“In today’s rapidly evolving AI landscape, promoting safe, secure and trustworthy AI practices in housing and lending is becoming increasingly important to protect consumers against algorithmic harms. Zillow’s open-source approach sets an admirable precedent for responsible innovation. We encourage other organizations and coalition groups to actively participate, test, and enhance the model and share their findings with the public.”
The decision to offer the Fair Housing Classifier “as open-source underscores Zillow’s commitment to transparency, equity and fair housing in real estate.”
Organizations looking to adopt “the Fair Housing Classifier can access the code and comprehensive framework on GitHub.”
Trusted partners who would like “to contribute to and enhance the classifier can reach out to the email alias on the GitHub page, through which they can request access to training data and a pretrained model, after presenting a genuine use case.”
This transparency is key “to encouraging contributions to improve the model. Improvements to the Fair Housing Classifier can be submitted via the standard request process on GitHub.”
Given the hundreds of millions of Americans searching “for housing online today, it’s vital that people are equipped with tools to make getting home more equitable and transparent — and less daunting.”
