Meta AI adviser spreads disinformation about shootings, vaccines, trans people (www.theguardian.com)

🤖 AI Summary
Meta quietly named Robby Starbuck—an anti‑DEI activist who sued the company over an alleged Meta AI mischaracterization—as an adviser on AI “fairness” in an August settlement; since then he has repeatedly posted debunked and inflammatory claims about mass shootings, vaccines, transgender people, protests and political opponents. Despite a joint statement from Meta executive Joel Kaplan asserting progress on reducing ideological bias and hallucinations in Meta AI, Starbuck’s online rhetoric (including false links between shooters and the political left, promotion of a discredited vaccine‑autism claim, and anti‑trans messaging) has drawn sharp rebukes from civil‑society groups and raised alarm that Meta has placed a polarizing figure in a role tied to model safety. Meta did not publicly disclose settlement terms or respond to requests for comment. For the AI/ML community this matters because adviser selections shape what “bias mitigation” looks like in practice. Technical stakes include evaluation criteria for political/ideological bias, labeling decisions, RLHF reward signals, content‑moderation thresholds, and methods to detect and reduce hallucinations. Appointing a partisan actor without transparency risks politicizing dataset curation and safety tradeoffs, undermining trust in model outputs and platform governance. The episode underscores the need for clear, auditable standards for external advisers, open disclosure of conflicts and settlement terms, and independent audits to ensure that debiasing interventions are evidence‑based rather than ideologically driven.
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