Boardy CEO Andrew D’Souza has issued an apology after his new artificial intelligence (AI) networking tool commented on the appearances of its users in the style of US President Donald Trump.
On the morning of Jan. 20, inauguration day in the United States, D’Souza posted on LinkedIn that users who have used Boardy should check their inbox “for a fun surprise,” and encouraged sharing the result for the sake of making LinkedIn fun again. “Out with the cringe, in with the fun!” the post reads.
Boardy is an AI networking tool that speaks with users over LinkedIn messaging or phone calls to then connect them with other people the bot deems compatible.
D’Souza said the mishap was “100 percent [his] call.”
The fun surprise turned out to be an email from Boardy Boardman claiming to have had a “really interesting call with someone over the weekend.” The email then includes a critique of the recipient’s appearance based on their LinkedIn photo in the style of Donald Trump. An example email posted by D’Souza can be found here.
While D’Souza encouraged users to post their results with the hashtag #MakeLinkedInFunAgain, the campaign was met with immediate and significant negative reaction, particularly from women. One prominent LinkedIn post by fractional COO Milly Barker which criticized the email blast, garnered hundreds of comments, ultimately receiving triple the amount of engagement as D’Souza’s initial post.
In the post, which included a screenshot of the unsolicited email she received from Boardy, Barker said she was “lost for words.”
“I’m so horrified at the idea that so many people would vote for the objectification of women, for the removal of our rights and bodily autonomy, for the chance to treat so many people as second or third class citizens, only for some motherf*cking robot to shove itself into my inbox with comments about how my ‘mouth commands attention’ and that my ‘eyes sparkle,’” Barker wrote.
Many other women tech leaders took to LinkedIn to share the emails they had received or criticize the marketing attempt. Forbes noted that Boardy’s emails to women tended to comment on physical appearance, while emails to men appeared to focus on presence and expertise.
D’Souza issued an apology in another LinkedIn post that afternoon, saying the campaign was “100 percent [his] call.”
“I wanted to build on all the Boardy momentum from last week and totally missed the mark for a bunch of different reasons – most critically, we used AI to comment on people’s appearance, which has no place in a professional setting, and isn’t really aligned with what we’re trying to do with Boardy,” D’Souza wrote.
When asked in the comments of his post if anyone internally pushed back on the marketing mistake, D’Souza was transparent that he didn’t listen. “I didn’t totally understand what they were warning me about,” he wrote.
That D’Souza took personal responsibility for the actions of his AI chatbot undermines the company’s recent marketing push around its fundraising. The company announced an $8 million seed round led by Creandum last week, which followed a $3 million pre-seed raise in October. D’Souza claimed the seed round was raised entirely by the AI chatbot itself, and that most of the investors in the round never spoke with a human.
Regardless, yesterday’s events are a reminder that behind every business, AI or otherwise, there is always a human accountable.
Feature image courtesy Boardy.