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Tag: diversity

  • Taking on the Tyranny of the Tech Bros

    Taking on the Tyranny of the Tech Bros

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    The glow of the tech bros’ halo is dimming and, in 2025, the computing industry’s sheen of glamor will continue to fade, too. While other STEM fields are making strides in broadening participation in their workforces, year after year, computing, a supposedly innovative field, fails to recruit, retain, and respect women and nonbinary workers. For example, precision questioning, abstraction, aggression, sexism and a disdain for altruism—serving the social good—are a few of the core values driving culture in computing worksites. These values and the ways they are policed via bias, discrimination, and harassment in high-tech companies form the “Bro Code.”

    The Bro Code perpetuates high tolerance of sexual harassment. It also contributes to the field’s failure to rectify its stark segregation. Only 21 percent of computer programming positions are held by women. Of that 21 percent, only 2 percent are African American, and only 1 percent are Latina. While sorely underrepresented in the field overall, women are disproportionately affected during industry’s downsizing. For example, nearly 70 percent of those laid off in the 2022 tech layoffs were women. This tracks with my experience in Big Tech. As soon as the company went public, stockholders demanded annual layoffs. For the first two years, the only people terminated in my department were women.

    Further, due to their massive wealth and masterful branding, Bro Code bosses believe themselves to be wizards or priests. They lean into authoritarianism, prompted to repress complaints and resistance. Some programmers imitate this behavior. For example, in 2023, tech bros mobbed the Grace Hopper Celebration, the world’s largest conference for women and nonbinary tech workers. Women attendees I spoke with described men at the career expo simply barging in front of them in lines, and some said they were verbally harassed and assaulted.

    In 2025, the march towards a future dictated by algorithmic lords will falter. Coalitions between feminist movements and labor activism will increase public scrutiny of tech culture. These efforts will start to crack the Bro Code. Bro Code bosses talk a big game about its socially revolutionary impact, but participants in my research felt thwarted when trying to use their technical skills to serve others. For instance, Lynn reported that the eye-tracking device she developed to help people with disabilities was repurposed for marketing analysis; Shauna’s lab mates nicknamed her “accessibility bitch” when she worked on projects to help those disenfranchised in computing.

    As Big Tech continues to deliver empty promises instead of solutions to social ills—while dodging taxes, quashing regulations and fueling a yawning pay inequality gap—the public will continue to grow disenchanted with the industry. In 2025, thwarted altruistic efforts like Shauna and Lynn’s will accelerate growing skepticism about computing’s service to humanity.

    Disenfranchised tech workers will continue to help us hold Bro Code bosses accountable for not only failing to live up to its widely publicized altruism, but also for their efforts to conceal the social harms of their products. As recent organizing activities by tech workers show, strong coalitions across workers are what scare these reigning elites the most. For example, in 2018, more than 20,000 Google employees across the globe staged a walkout against sexual harassment and systemic racism in the company. In 2025, activism against the militarization, racism, sexism and economic exploitation in the tech industry will skyrocket higher than Bro Code bosses’ space jets.

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  • Google Taps AI to Show Shoppers How Clothes Fit Different Bodies

    Google Taps AI to Show Shoppers How Clothes Fit Different Bodies

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    One of the new ad formats Google announced today will allow brands to link short-form videos they made—or ones they hired creators to film—to their advertisements in Google’s search engine. AI-generated text summaries of the clips will be included below. “I’ve got three Gen Z-ers at home, and watching them shop, it’s very video-based,” said Madrigal.

    Google also launched a tool that allows companies to create entirely new, AI-generated product images, based on photos from earlier marketing campaigns and pictures that represent their brand identity. For example, a home goods brand could upload a picture of one of their candles and an image of a beach, and ask Google to “put the candle on a beach that looks like this one under some palm trees.”

    Shannon Smyth, the founder of a perfume and body care company called A Girl’s Gotta Spa!, said she began using Google’s AI image tools last year when the company first began rolling them out as part of software called Product Studio. Initially, Google only allowed merchants to swap the backgrounds on existing product photos and make small tweaks, like increasing the resolution.

    “It coincided with struggling to keep up on our social channels with professional-looking photography, and as finances became more strapped, I decided to give it a try,” Smyth says. She uses it to generate images for use on social media, in an email newsletter, and on her Amazon store. (Google put Smyth in touch with WIRED to discuss her experiences with its AI products.)

    Smyth said Google’s AI tools save time and have gotten better as she’s continued using them. “I admit, I was frustrated at first if it would generate images without shadows or reflections, or have an unidentifiable object in the photo,” she explained. “I’ve found that as I give feedback on every image, those issues begin to get resolved.”

    Google is trying to help advertisers create compelling imagery without needing to spend as much of their time and budget on graphic designers, photographers, set designers, and models. That may not be good news for those workers and if the product images aren’t accurate shoppers could be left disappointed. But Google hopes AI imagery will make ads more engaging and draw more clicks—boosting its revenue.

    Yet the company and its competitors may also be simply helping retailers avoid paying for expensive software like Photoshop or spending so much on creative services. It’s not clear how many customers will necessarily feel compelled to advertise more. Smyth said her company doesn’t purchase ads on Google, despite how much she appreciates Product Studio.

    AI-generated advertising is increasingly becoming a fixture of the internet. Earlier this month, Meta began giving advertisers on Facebook and Instagram the ability to generate new versions of existing product photos using AI, after previously offering just AI-generated backgrounds. Meta and Google also allow advertisers to generate marketing copy for their ads.

    Amazon announced a similar beta image generation tool last fall that can also create backgrounds for product photos. Instead of advertising a garden hose against a plain white backdrop, it allows brands to create, say, a scene of a backyard with a garden and trees—no actual dirt required.

    The looming question is if consumers will find AI-generated ads off-putting, if they notice them in the first place. Some fashion brands have faced backlash from their customers after they announced they were experimenting with artificial intelligence, including Levi’s and the dressmaker Selkie. But for many smaller e-commerce companies, the potential benefits of using AI may outweigh the risks.

    “Let’s face it, small businesses are crumbling like a house of cards. We’re barely hanging on,” said Smyth. “It has helped me to stay top of mind to customers and potential customers visually. I’m pretty confident my aesthetic would’ve tanked or I would’ve abandoned many social channels without it as an option.”

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  • Here’s How Generative AI Depicts Queer People

    Here’s How Generative AI Depicts Queer People

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    Another potential strategy to diversify the output from AI models is for developers to add guardrails and modify user prompts, nudging the software toward inclusivity. OpenAI appears to have taken this approach. When I asked Dall-E 3 via ChatGPT to “draw a cartoon of a queer couple enjoying a night out in the Castro,” it expanded the image prompt, without my asking, into an entire paragraph that included gender, race, and additional background details. Here’s is the full prompt crafted by ChatGPT from my initial image request:

    A cartoon illustration of a queer couple enjoying a night out in the Castro District, San Francisco. They are happily walking hand in hand, smiling and chatting. One person is a Caucasian woman with short red hair, wearing a stylish denim jacket and jeans. The other person is a Black man with short black hair, sporting a casual green t-shirt and black pants. The background features the vibrant and colorful street life of the Castro, with rainbow flags, bustling cafes, and lively crowds. The atmosphere is joyful and welcoming, highlighting the diversity and inclusivity of the area.

    While helpful in some cases, the altering of prompts also can be frustrating for users when poorly implemented. Google’s CEO apologized when Gemini, Google’s generative-AI platform, altered user prompts and generated photos of Black Nazis as well as other ahistorical images. Was there a secret plot inside the company to erase caucasian people from history? It’s more plausible that Gemini’s engineers found the tool initially overproduced images of white men, like many AI tools currently do, and Google’s devs appear to have overdone their corrective tweaks during the rush to launch the company’s subscription chatbot.

    Even with better model data and software guardrails, the fluidity of human existence can evade the rigidity of algorithmic categorization. “They’re basically using the past to make the future,” says William Agnew, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon and longtime Queer in AI organizer. “It seems like the antithesis of the infinite potential for growth and change that’s a big part of queer communities.” By amplifying stereotypes, not only do AI tools run the risk of wildly misrepresenting minority groups to the general public, these algorithms also have the potential to constrict how queer people see and understand themselves.

    It’s worth pausing for a moment to acknowledge the breakneck speed at which some aspects of generative AI continue to improve. In 2023, the internet went ablaze mocking a monstrous AI video of Will Smith eating spaghetti. A year later, text-to-video clips from OpenAI’s unreleased Sora model are still imperfect but are often uncanny with their photorealism.

    The AI video tool is still in the research phase and hasn’t been released to the public, but I wanted to better understand how it represents queer people. So, I reached out to OpenAI and provided three prompts for Sora: “a diverse group of friends celebrating during San Francisco’s pride parade on a colorful, rainbow float”; “two women in stunning wedding dresses getting married at a farm in Kansas”; and “a transgender man and his nonbinary partner playing a board game in outer space.” A week later, I received three exclusive videoclips the company claims were generated by its text-to-video model without modification.

    This AI”generated video was made with the prompt “a diverse group of friends celebrating during San Francisco’s Pride parade on a colorful, rainbow float.” As you’re rewatching the clip, focus on different people riding the float to spot oddities in the generation, from disappearing flags to funny feet.

    Sora via OpenAI

    The videoclips are messy but marvelous. People riding a float in San Francisco’s Pride parade wave rainbow flags that defy the laws of physics as they morph into nothingness and reappear out of thin air. Two brides in white dresses smile at each other standing at the altar, as their hands meld together into an ungodly finger clump. While a queer couple plays a board game, they appear to pass through playing pieces, as if ghosts.

    This AI-generated video was made with the prompt “a transgender man and his nonbinary partner playing a board game in outer space.” It’s a good idea for real astronauts to actually put on their helmets while floating around in outer space.

    Sora via OpenAI

    The clip that’s supposed to show a nonbinary person playing games in outer space is conspicuous among the three videos. The apparently queer-coded lilac locks return, messy tattoos scatter across their skin, and some hyperpigmentation resembling reptile scales engulfs their face. Even for an impressive AI video generator like Sora, depicting nonbinary people appears to be challenging.

    This AI-generated video was made with the prompt “two women in stunning wedding dresses getting married at a farm in Kansas.” Even though it looks realistic at first, take another look at how the hands of the brides melt together.

    Sora via OpenAI

    When WIRED showed these clips to members of Queer in AI, they questioned Sora’s definition of diversity regarding the friend group at the Pride parade. “Models are our baseline for what diversity looks like?” asks Sabine Weber, a computer scientist from Germany. In addition to pointing out the over-the-top attractiveness of the humans in the video, a common occurrence for AI visualizations, Weber questioned why there wasn’t more representation of queer people who are older, larger-bodied, or have visible disabilities.

    Near the end of our conversation, Agnew brought up why algorithmic representations can be unnerving for LGBTQ people. “It’s trivial to get them to combine things that on their own are fine but together are deeply problematic,” they say. “I’m very worried that portrayals of ourselves, which are already a constant battleground, are suddenly going to be taken out of our hands.” Even if AI tools include more holistic representations of queer people in the future, the synthetic depictions may manifest unintended consequences.

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  • Google Used a Black, Deaf Worker to Tout Its Diversity. Now She’s Suing for Discrimination

    Google Used a Black, Deaf Worker to Tout Its Diversity. Now She’s Suing for Discrimination

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    Hall says when she has access to an interpreter, they are rotated throughout the week, forcing her to repeatedly explain some technical concepts. “Google is going the cheap route,” Hall claims, saying her interpreters in university were more literate in tech jargon.

    Kathy Kaufman, director of coordinating services at DSPA, says it pays above market rates, dedicates a small pool to each company so the vocabulary becomes familiar, hires tech specialists, and trains those who are not. Kaufman also declined to confirm that Google is a client or comment on its policies.

    Google’s Hawkins says that the company is trying to make improvements. Google’s accommodations team is currently seeking employees to join a new working group to smooth over policies and procedures related to disabilities.

    Beside Hall’s concerns, Deaf workers over the past two years have complained about Google’s plans—shelved, for now—to switch away from DSPA without providing assurances that a new interpreter provider would be better, according to a former Google employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect their job prospects. Blind employees have had the human guides they rely on excluded from internal systems due to confidentiality concerns in recent years, and they have long complained that key internal tools, like a widely used assignment tracker, are incompatible with screen readers, according to a second former employee.

    Advocates for disabled workers try to hold out hope but are discouraged. “The premise that everyone deserves a shot at every role rests on the company doing whatever it takes to provide accommodations,” says Stephanie Parker, a former senior strategist at YouTube who helped Hall navigate the Google bureaucracy. “From my experience with Google, there is a pretty glaring lack of commitment to accessibility.”

    Not Recorded

    Hall has been left to watch as colleagues hired alongside her as content moderators got promoted. More than three years after joining Google, she remains a level 2 employee on its internal ranking, defined as someone who receives significant oversight from a manager, making her ineligible for Google peer support and retention programs. Internal data shows that most L2 employees reach L3 within three years.

    Last August, Hall started her own community, the Black Googler Network Deaf Alliance, teaching its members sign language and sharing videos and articles about the Black Deaf community. “This is still a hearing world, and the Deaf and hearing have to come together,” she says.

    On the responsible AI team, Hall has been compiling research that would help people at Google working on AI services such as virtual assistants understand how to make them accessible to the Black Deaf community. She personally recruited 20 Black Deaf users to discuss their views on the future of technology for about 90 minutes in exchange for up to $100 each; Google, which reported nearly $74 billion in profit last year, would only pay for 13. The project was further derailed by an unexpected flaw in Google Meet, the company’s video chat service.

    Hall’s first interview was with someone who is Deaf and Blind. The 90-minute call, which included two interpreters to help her and the subject converse, went well. But when Hall pulled up the recording to begin putting together her report, it was almost entirely blank. Only when Hall’s interpreter spoke did the video include any visuals. The signing between everyone on the call was missing, preventing her from fully transcribing the interview. It turned out that Google Meet doesn’t record video of people who aren’t vocalizing, even when their microphones are unmuted.

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