Meta, the tech giant formerly known as Facebook, has recently formed a new AI advisory council consisting exclusively of white men, a move that has sparked widespread criticism for its lack of diversity.
This decision is particularly controversial, given the company’s public commitments to diversity and inclusion.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, announced the creation of the Meta Advisory Group, which is designed to provide strategic guidance on the company’s Artificial Intelligence and technological advancements.
The council includes Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, and former Microsoft executive Charlie Songhurst.
These members bring a wealth of experience in technology and business but lack diversity in terms of gender and race.
Unlike Meta’s 11-person board of directors, the advisory group does not have fiduciary responsibilities and is not elected by shareholders. The group will meet periodically with Meta’s management to offer insights and recommendations.
With this news going online, people worldwide started sharing their perspectives and opinions.
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Critics have pointed out the absence of women and people of color on the council, highlighting the ongoing issue of underrepresentation in the tech industry.
This lack of diversity is seen as a step backward, particularly in an area as impactful as AI development, which affects a broad range of societal issues.
Historically, AI systems have exhibited biases that disproportionately affect marginalized groups, including women and people of color.
Meta disbanded its Responsible AI division six months prior to forming this new group. The disbanded team had focused on ensuring the ethical deployment of AI technologies.
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The formation of the advisory council has been met with huge backlash from various quarters, including tech industry insiders, diversity advocates, and media outlets.
The consensus is that Meta missed an opportunity to include diverse voices that could provide broader perspectives on AI’s societal impacts.
Similar criticism was directed at OpenAI when it appointed an all-white male board, leading to subsequent changes to include more diverse members.
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In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Sarah Myers West, managing director at the AI Now Institute, emphasized the importance of critically examining the institutions producing AI to ensure that public needs are served.
“This is error-prone technology, and we know from independent research that those errors are not distributed equally, they disproportionately harm communities that have long borne the brunt of discrimination,” she said. “We should be setting a much, much higher bar.”
She highlighted that AI technology is error-prone and that these errors disproportionately harm communities that have long faced discrimination. The prevalence of nonconsensual, sexually explicit AI-generated deepfake videos, which overwhelmingly target women, exemplifies the darker side of AI development. According to Sensity AI, 96% of deepfake videos online in 2019 were nonconsensual and sexually explicit.
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The current development of AI perpetuates existing power structures regarding class, race, gender, and Eurocentrism.
Many tech leaders are so focused on rapid innovation that they fail to address the exacerbation of societal problems by Generative AI.
A McKinsey report indicated that AI could automate roughly half of all jobs that don’t require a four-year degree and pay over $42,000 annually, jobs in which minority workers are overrepresented.
Historically, women and people of color have borne the brunt of harm from tech advancements, making their inclusion in decision-making processes crucial.
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Additionally, research released last year suggested that Meta’s Facebook algorithm targets users with job postings based on gender stereotypes, despite the company not allowing advertisers to target ads based on gender.
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Meta’s decision to form an AI advisory council composed solely of white men has sparked criticism and highlighted the ongoing challenges of achieving diversity and inclusion in the tech industry.
The backlash serves as a reminder of the critical need for diverse representation in guiding the ethical development and deployment of AI technologies.
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