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.”
President Trump has cut hundreds of science, technology and health funding grants touching on DEI themes, but its influence on commercial development of chatbots and other AI products is more indirect. In investigating AI companies, Congressman Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the judiciary committee, said he wants to find out whether President Biden’s administration “coerced or colluded with” them to censor lawful speech.
The director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios, said at a Texas event this month that Mr. Biden’s AI policies were “promoting social divisions and redistribution in the name of equity.”
The Trump administration noted several examples of what he meant. One was a line from a Biden-era AI research strategy that said: “Without proper controls, AI systems can amplify, perpetuate, or exacerbate inequitable or undesirable outcomes for individuals and communities.”
Mr. Biden’s election propelled some tech companies to accelerate their focus on AI “fairness.” The 2022 arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT added new priorities, sparking a commercial boom in new AI applications for composing documents and generating images, pressuring companies like Google to ease its caution and catch up.
Then came Google’s Gemini AI chatbot — and a flawed product rollout last year that would make it the symbol of “woke AI” that conservatives hoped to unravel.
Google tried to place technical guardrails to reduce bias before rolling out Gemini’s AI image generator just over a year ago, and the company ended up overcompensating for the bias, placing people of color and women in inaccurate historical settings, such as answering a request for American founding fathers with images of Black, Asian and Native American men in 18th century attire.
Google quickly apologized and temporarily pulled the plug on the feature, but the outrage became a rallying cry taken up by the political right.
With Google chief executive Sundar Pichai sitting nearby, Vice President Vance used an AI summit in Paris in February to decry the advancement of “downright ahistorical social agendas through AI,” naming the moment when Google’s AI image generator was “trying to tell us that George Washington was Black, or that America’s doughboys in World War I were, in fact, women.”
“We have to remember the lessons from that ridiculous moment,” Mr. Vance declared at the gathering. “And what we take from it is that the Trump administration will ensure that AI systems developed in America are free from ideological bias and never restrict our citizens’ right to free speech.”
