  Activists, journalists, and scholars have long raised critical questions
about the relationship between diversity, representation, and structural
exclusions in data-intensive tools and services. We build on work mapping the
emergent landscape of corporate AI ethics to center one outcome of these
conversations: the incorporation of diversity and inclusion in corporate AI
ethics activities. Using interpretive document analysis and analytic tools from
the values in design field, we examine how diversity and inclusion work is
articulated in public-facing AI ethics documentation produced by three
companies that create application and services layer AI infrastructure: Google,
Microsoft, and Salesforce.
  We find that as these documents make diversity and inclusion more tractable
to engineers and technical clients, they reveal a drift away from civil rights
justifications that resonates with the managerialization of diversity by
corporations in the mid-1980s. The focus on technical artifacts, such as
diverse and inclusive datasets, and the replacement of equity with fairness
make ethical work more actionable for everyday practitioners. Yet, they appear
divorced from broader DEI initiatives and other subject matter experts that
could provide needed context to nuanced decisions around how to operationalize
these values. Finally, diversity and inclusion, as configured by engineering
logic, positions firms not as ethics owners but as ethics allocators; while
these companies claim expertise on AI ethics, the responsibility of defining
who diversity and inclusion are meant to protect and where it is relevant is
pushed downstream to their customers.
