In April, the US Commerce Department quietly deleted AI fairness language from its standards guidance, motioning a policy shift under political pressure against woke AI that critics warned could increase algorithmic bias against marginalized groups in the wake of political opposition to DEI tech initiatives.
The changes tail a Republican-led House Judiciary Committee investigation targeting woke AI practices by Big Tech giants, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and AI giant, OpenAI, among others.
Last month, the Trump administration made it abundantly clear that “advancing equity” in neutral AI is squarely in the sights, following broader political attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the tech sector. On the heels of a growing trend in Washington, “woke AI” has become the new bogeyman of algorithmic discriminatory harm, marking it as a top target of investigation.
Ellis Monk sociologist at Harvard, addressed the shift in anti woke AI as life or death implications in the real world.
Monk, whose skin tone is an indicator was adopted by Google to make AI image tools better, said, “but could future funding for those kinds of projects be lowered? Absolutely, when the political mood shifts and when there’s a lot of pressure to get to market very quickly.”
While Monk’s work is already embedded in major products like smartphone cameras and non woke AI image generators, he and other researchers fear that chilling future initiatives will leave technology increasingly blind to the needs of Black, brown, and other minority communities. Historically, bias algorithm AI in technologies like computer vision have disproportionately harmed people with darker skin tones.
“Black people or darker skinned people would come in the picture and we’d look ridiculous sometimes,” Monk said.
Backlash Against AI
The disassembling of fairness language aligns with Republican efforts to frame DEI initiates as biased and divisive. Michael Kratsios, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, condemned the Biden-era AI policy for “promoting social divisions and redistribution in the name of equity,” and Jim Jordan chair of the judiciary committee vowed to investigate whether the Biden administration “coerced or colluded with” with tech companies to censor lawful speech.
Back in February, Vice President JD Vance focused on the backlash during the Paris AI summit, blaming Google’s disastrous fallout of its Gemini image generator.
The Vice President condemned efforts to eliminate racial and gender bias from woke AI generated biases as shoving “downright ahistorical social agendas through AI,” referring to the moment when Google’s AI had misinterpreted America’s founders as people of color.
“We have to remember the lessons from that ridiculous moment,” Vance added, “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.”
Conservatives Concerned About AI
Beyond political debates, ignoring fairness causes real-world harm as study after study has revealed that AI and algorithmic bias systems perform worse for people of color. From autonomous vehicles that fail to identify darker skinned pedestrians to facial analysis software that wrongly detains African American individuals, mostly men.
In 2019, the first Trump administration’s own scientists acknowledged that facial analysis technology showed racial, gender, and age-based disparities.
“Fundamentally, to say that AI systems are ideologically biased is to say that you identify, recognize and are concerned about the problem of algorithmic bias, which is the problem that many of us have been worried about for a long time,” commented former acting director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, Alondra Nelson.
Nelson was skeptical about major progress under current framing, “I think in this political space, unfortunately, that is quite unlikely.”
Without institutional supervision, the opposite of fair standards stands to leave historically looked down on communities increasingly vulnerable to the systemic AI liberal bias with which AI systems left unchecked tend to be recreated.
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