Are you next? Ask yourself: What is the difference between artificial and real? Then ask AI.
After two years of trying and failing to sign up for Waymo, friends inside the company told Dr. Nasser Mohamed his Middle Eastern Muslim name set off the AI identity screening. But Dr. Mohamed alleges he couldn’t get a human to correct the error. So now he’s suing the company and its corporate parent, Alphabet.
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in San Francisco Superior Court, the Qatari-born-and-raised-physician claimed Alphabet, Inc. and its subsidiary Waymo, LLC, discriminated against him based on ethnicity, religion, and national origin when they denied him equal access to their services after their artificial intelligence-powered identity verification program erroneously identified him as a terrorist on the U.S. Government’s Office of Foreign Assets Control Sanctions List.
“My entire life and my background and my work are quite public,” Mohamed told KQED. “I’m a physician and an LGBT rights activist based in San Francisco, California. And I’m known for my work within medicine, but also in civil rights work.” He was even elected to serve as Grand Marshall in the 2023 San Francisco Pride Parade. He’s served on the board of San Francisco Pride.
-KQED