Trump wants to end tech industry’s ’woke AI’ efforts to address bias

Tech companies could now face a second reckoning over their DEI work in AI products.

After retreating from their workplace diversity, equity and inclusion programs, tech companies could now face a second reckoning over their DEI work in AI products.

In the White House and the Republican-led Congress, "woke AI” has replaced harmful algorithmic discrimination as a problem that needs fixing. Past efforts to “advance equity” in AI development and curb the production of “harmful and biased outputs” are a target of investigation, according to subpoenas sent to Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and 10 other tech companies last month by the House Judiciary Committee.

And the standard-setting branch of the U.S. Commerce Department has deleted mentions of AI fairness, safety and “responsible AI” in its appeal for collaboration with outside researchers. It is instead instructing scientists to focus on “reducing ideological bias” in a way that will “enable human flourishing and economic competitiveness,” according to a copy of the document obtained by The Associated Press.

In some ways, tech workers are used to a whiplash of Washington-driven priorities affecting their work.

But the latest shift has raised concerns among experts in the field, including Harvard University sociologist Ellis Monk, who several years ago was approached by Google to help make its AI products more inclusive.

Back then, the tech industry already knew it had a problem with the branch of AI that trains machines to “see” and understand images. Computer vision held great commercial promise but echoed the historical biases found in earlier camera technologies that portrayed Black and brown people in an unflattering light.

“Black people or darker skinned people would come in the picture and we’d look ridiculous sometimes,” said Monk, a scholar of colorism, a form of discrimination based on people’s skin tones and other features.