Meta’s new AI council consists entirely of white men

Meta‘s announcement of an all-white male AI advisory council sparks concerns about inclusivity in AI development. With a history of harmful impacts on marginalized communities, there’s a growing call for diverse voices and rigorous oversight to address biases and ensure AI serves everyone equitably.

Meta announced on Wednesday that it would be making an AI advisory council with only white men. What else do you think we can expect? Women and people of colour have been complaining for decades that they are ignored and left out of the world of AI, even though they are qualified and have played a big part in its development.

In terms of race and gender, the Oversight Board and Meta’s actual board of directors are more diverse than this new advisory board. The shareholders did not choose this AI board, and it bears no obligation to them.

Meta said that the board would give “insights and recommendations on tactical growth opportunities, technological advances, and new ideas.” Periodically, it would come together.

The absence of ethicists or individuals with academic or deep research backgrounds from the AI advisory council speaks volumes. Because they’ve brought so many products to market, current and former executives at Stripe, Shopify, and Microsoft might seem like good candidates to oversee Meta’s AI product roadmap.

However, repeated experiences have demonstrated that AI differs significantly from other products. It’s part of the job to take risks, and if something goes wrong, it can hurt groups that are already having a hard time.

A nonprofit called the AI Now Institute, led by Sarah Myers West, studies the social effects of AI. In a recent interview, West stressed the importance of “critically examining” the AI-making institutions to ensure they are serving the public’s needs.

She stated, “We know from our research that this technology frequently makes mistakes that harm communities that have experienced long-term discrimination more than others.” “We should set a very, very high bar.”

Women experience the negative effects of AI far more frequently than men do. In 2019, Sensity AI found that 96% of AI deepfake videos online were sexually explicit videos that people did not agree to watch. Since then, the prevalence of generative AI has increased significantly, resulting in continued harm to women.

In January, there was a significant story about the sharing of pornographic deepfakes of Taylor Swift without her consent. One of the most widely shared posts, with hundreds of thousands of likes and 45 million views. X hasn’t always been good at protecting women in these situations, but because Taylor Swift is one of the most powerful women in the world, they stepped in and banned search terms like “Taylor Swift ai” and “Taylor Swift deepfake.”

But you might not be able to do anything about it if you’re not a worldwide pop star. A lot of reports say that middle school and high school students are making explicit deepfakes of their classmates.

This technology has been around for a while, but it’s never been easier to get your hands on. You don’t even need to know how to use computers to get apps that promise to “undress” pictures of women or change their faces on pornography. Facebook and Instagram displayed ads for an app named Perky AI, promising to create explicit pictures.

Meta didn’t notice two of the advertisements until someone alerted them to the issue. They showed blurred photos of celebrities Sabrina Carpenter and Jenna Ortega and asked people to tell the app to take off their clothes. The ads featured a 16-year-old Ortega picture.

Letting Perky AI advertise was a bad idea more than once. The Oversight Board at Meta has just started to look into why the company didn’t do anything about reports that AI made sexually explicit content.

Women and people of color must have their voices heard when developing AI products. For too long, these kinds of disadvantaged groups have been shut out of the research and development of technologies that could change the world, and the results have been terrible.

For instance, until the 1970s, women could not participate in clinical trials. This led to the creation of entire fields of research without considering their impact on women. Unmade technology particularly impacts Black people. For example, a 2019 study from the Georgia Institute of Technology found that self-driving cars are more likely to hit black people because their sensors might have a harder time detecting black skin.

Unveiling the Biases: The troubling impact of AI development on social inequality

Algorithms only perpetuate the biases that people teach them when they train on already biased data. In general, AI systems are already making racial discrimination worse in areas like housing, employment, and the criminal justice system.

Axios noted that voice assistants struggle to comprehend diverse accents and frequently identify non-English speaking individuals’ work as AI-generated, given that AI’s primary language is English. Face recognition systems are more likely to flag black people as possible matches for criminal suspects than white people.

The current development of AI is influenced by the same power structures of class, race, gender, and Eurocentrism that we observe in other areas, and it appears that not enough leaders are taking action to address these issues. Instead, they are making it stronger. Many investors, founders, and tech leaders are eager to innovate and accelerate progress. They don’t seem to understand that generative AI, which is the newest and hottest AI technology, could make things worse instead of better. Machines could perform about half of all jobs that don’t require a four-year degree and pay over $42,000 annually.

One of the world’s largest tech companies has a team of all-white men who are trying to save the world with AI. It’s unclear how this group of men, who only represent a small group of people, could advise on products for the entire population.

Building technology that everyone, really everyone, can use will take a lot of work. This advisory board won’t assist Meta in ensuring the safety and inclusivity of AI, as it requires extensive research and an understanding of society’s intersectional dynamics. One good thing about Meta is that it could lead to the start of another business.