内容摘要：Associated Press writers Collin Binkley and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington and Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana, contributed to this report.

Associated Press writers Collin Binkley and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington and Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana, contributed to this report.

Even before Biden took office, a growing body of research and personal anecdotes was attracting attention to the harms of AI bias.self-driving car technology has a hard time detecting darker-skinned pedestrians, putting them in greater danger of getting run over.

popular AI text-to-image generators to make a picture of a surgeon found they produced a white man about 98% percent of the time, far higher than the real proportions even in a heavily male-dominated field.Face-matching software for unlocking phones misidentified Asian faces. Police in U.S. citiesbased on false face recognition matches. And a decade ago, Google’s own photos app sorted a picture of two Black people into a category labeled as “gorillas.”

Even government scientists in the first Trump administrationthat facial recognition technology was performing unevenly based on race, gender or age.

Biden’s election propelled some tech companies to accelerate their focus on AI fairness. The 2022 arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT added new priorities, sparking a commercial boom in new AI applications for composing documents and generating images, pressuring companies like Google to ease its caution and catch up.

Then came Google’s Gemini AI chatbot — and a flawed product rollout last year that would make it the symbol of “woke AI” that conservatives hoped to unravel. Left to their own devices, AI tools that generate images from a written prompt are prone to perpetuating the stereotypes accumulated from all the visual data they were trained on.Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff asked Zeldin why he had canceled a $19.8 million grant to Thomasville, Georgia, to replace a wastewater collection system and build a community health clinic.

“Is a new health clinic for Thomasville woke?” Ossoff asked, noting that the grant was approved under an environmental justice program the EPA has terminated.Zeldin again cited policy priorities before Ossoff, a Democrat, cut him off. “You hurt my constituents,’' he said.

Zeldin later said grants to Thomasville and towns in Alaska and Washington state may be restored if language about environmental justice and diversity is removed, in accordance with an executive order by Trump.Zeldin declined to provide specific goals for EPA staffing under his tenure, but appeared to acknowledge claims by Merkley and Murray that staff totals could return to a level last seen under former President Ronald Reagan. The EPA had fewer than 11,000 employees in 1983, compared to more than 15,100 in 2024.