Picture this: a big tech company creates a generative AI model that’s supposed to be more powerful, but also inclusive than what came before it. However, due to a likely lack of diverse enough data sets, the model is supposed to overcorrect for diversity, leading togenerated images that are historically inaccurate.
An important company representative is then confronted with how the business is dealing with these problems by a person wearing a shirt with a print of a photo-realistic naked female body, and answers the question seemingly without addressing the crass and inappropriate choice of wardrobe at all. And as the icing on the cake, this is all unfolding just a few days beforeInternational Women’s Day.
This is what happened at a recent hackathon hosted at AGI House in San Francisco, attended by many high-level AI and machine learning experts. At the generative AI-focused event, Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a surprise appearance, ready to work with the attendees on AI topics,which he now focuses on at Google. One of the attendees had an interesting choice of attire, though, donning a T-shirt with a photo-realistic depiction of a female body.
The issue was raised by Jennifer Stirrup, a recognized data science and AI specialist. “As a woman in tech, I don’t want to be working in a professional working environment where T-shirts like this are allowed,” shewrites in a post on X. “Misogyny is often blunt and thoughtless as well as directly offensive. It shows up when people don’t take women as seriously as men. So we are reduced to our bodies and sexual utility, again and again.”
It’s unclear if Sergey Brin addressed the inappropriate T-shirt of the person asking the question at all. The video only shows a portion of the person’s question and Brin’s answer, both of which are muffled enough to not be 100% understandable. It seems that the short excerpt that was made public mostly revolved around the question itself, though.
It also looks like the organizers’ social media team even endorses the way the person is dressed. AGI House, the venue where the event took place, repostedtwo postsshowingthe same videoof the person’s question on X. It also appears that none of the other participants of the event spoke out about the T-shirt publicly, though it’s not clear if they were not bothered by it or if they were afraid or uncomfortable to do so.
While the video appears to show that the room is filled with men only,another perspective that shows Brin walking inreveals that there appears to be some female representation, though it’s far from balanced out.
This is not an isolated case
The industry has problems at scale
The tech industry is incredibly male-dominated, and with events like this unfolding without obvious immediate repercussions (at least in the eye of the public), it’s no wonder that this is the case. This isn’t the first time we’re seeing inappropriate behavior like this, and it likely won’t be the last. In fact, Google was just forced to pay $118 million in 2022to settle a gender discrimination lawsuit. Only a year later, in October 2023,Google had to pay out $1 millionto a female executive due to gender bias.
Both actions at large like the lawsuits and individual acts of overstepping like the person with the T-shirt can push away women and anyone who doesn’t want to work in an environment like this, making it impossible to create the kinds of diverse groups of people we need to make technology less biased. In the age of generative AI with its big problems with diversity due tolimited and inherently skewed data sets— which likely caused Gemini’s images to overcorrect for diversity in the first place —, this is all the more important.
At the same time, we need to acknowledge that companies are working to achieve more diversity, at least on paper. Google’s quest to more accurately represent all kinds of skin tones with its True Tone camera tuning comes to mind as just one example. The company also has diversity and gender equality goalslisted on a dedicated website, though it seems to have last been updated in 2022 and stands in opposition to the lawsuits mentioned earlier. Another big tech company, Apple, is also actively working towards a more inclusive workspace, at least according to itsown inclusion and diversity statistics.
These are just a few examples and all of them are steps in the right direction, but as long as men can walk around events with t-shirts displaying inappropriate content and equality lawsuits are hitting tech companies, it’s clear that the industry still has a long way to go.
