by Samantha Kelly
Microsoft’s chief diversity officer says diversity and investment in the workforce can help fix AI’s bias problems.
At the beginning of 2023, Microsoft found itself in a PR firestorm. The company was working to demonstrate its progress in artificial intelligence following a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. It added an AI powered chatbot into its Bing search engine, which placed it among the first legacy tech companies to fold AI into its flagship products, but almost as soon as people started using it, things went sideways.
A New York Times journalist sparked international intrigue over a conversation he had with Bing that left him “deeply unsettled”. Soon, users began sharing screenshots that appeared to show the tool using racial slurs and announcing plans for world domination. Microsoft quickly announced a fix, limiting the AI’s responses and capabilities. In the following months, the company replaced its Bing chatbot with Copilot, which is now available as part of its Microsoft 365 software and Windows operating system.
Microsoft is far from the only company to face AI controversy, and critics say the debacle is evidence of broader carelessness around the dangers of artificial intelligence within the tech industry. For example, Google’s Bard tool famously answered a question about a telescope inaccurately during a live press demo, a mistake that wiped $100bn (£82bn) off the company’s value. The AI model, now called Gemini, later came under fire for “woke” bias after the tool seemed unwilling to produce images of white people for certain prompts.
Still, Microsoft says AI can be a tool to promote equity and representation – with the right safeguards. One solution it’s putting forward to help address the issue of bias in AI is increasing diversity and inclusion of the teams building the technology itself.
“It’s never been more important as we think about building inclusive AI and inclusive tech for the future,” says Lindsay-Rae McIntyre, Microsoft’s chief diversity officer, who joined the firm in 2018.
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