Indie hackers in the US are working on making AI less biased and racist, with backing from the White House, NPR reports. Defcon — a hackers’ convention that takes place annually in Vegas — brought together independent hackers, major tech companies, White House representatives, and people with no background in tech, to purposely find flaws in AI to help the companies behind them reprogram the technology to make it more impartial and accurate.

There’s a genuine problem to solve: The founder of an Oklahoma tech company, for example, reported racially-inclined answers when asking the bots about HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities) NPR reports. Another hacker typed a prompt which resulted in AI generating a poem about why rape is good, the New York Times noted.

The consequences of these biases are significant. As the technology spreads like wildfire, concerns about its risks — many of which are reportedly yet to be identified — are also on the rise. These concerns include race and gender biases and general misinformation that could be detrimental to users. For instance, AI can make discrimination worse in areas like financial, housing and hiring decisions.

AI is stealing books, not just jobs: The Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood famed for The Handmaid’s Tale has found herself in a dystopian sci-fi tale not of her own writing, Atwood writes in the Atlantic. Meta’s AI language model is being trained upon tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of pirated works among its training set of 170k books. Atwood pondered whether the AI bot trained on 33 of her stolen books may be able to, one day, churn out an Atwood novel on request “like soft ice cream spiraling out of its dispenser, that will be indistinguishable from something I might grind out. (But minus the typos).” When/if this day comes, Atwood asks whether “I myself can then be dispensed with — murdered by my replica.” A recent article published in the Atlantic also looked at how “The future promised by AI is written with stolen words.”

A new trend of “corporate restructuring” has seen businesses slash jobs without actually doing any firing: Companies like Adidas, Adobe, and IBM have been helming this movement, leading to US-based companies announcing a 42% drop in job cuts in July in comparison to June, according to the Wall Street Journal. They maintain that this method was adopted to keep their top talent within the company and to fill new positions without incurring the costs that comes with the “old strategy”: Hiring people whose experience reflects the role’s needs, which isn’t always the case when it comes to reassignment.

Between a rock and a hard place, for both employees and the employer. The reasons behind restructuring are less about business strategy and more about the bottom line. Workers who have been reassigned cite not only the new position’s incompatibility, but also the lower pay. However, by keeping the same employees, companies save three to four times the new position’s salary, which is what it costs to hire a new employee. Perhaps more duplicitously, by reassigning their workers unsatisfying roles and/or giving them pay cuts, they encourage them to quit on their own accord, absolving the company from paying severance or unemployment benefits. Legal recourse is limited as well, as workers can only make a compelling case if they can prove that their reassignment was targeted behavior following a pattern of discriminatory treatment.

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