When Splitting a Plate of Chicken Liver Mousse Launched a Conversation on AI Fairness
How discussing the best way to split an appetizer launched a discussion on AI fairness and incentive modeling
Dinner slots for April also linked below
For a restaurant named Picnic, it perfectly replicated the environment of a public park. Enclaves of communities found their space along stretches of wooden tables. Children raced between adjacent tables chased by the exhaustive sighs of their parents. A bachelorette party in full swing, enshrining the bride-to-be in a kaleidoscope of princess hats. If it weren't for the steady stream of waitstaff exchanging plates of hot food for polished porcelain, it could have been a picnic held on the banks of the Schuylkill.
After a moment of deliberation our table was presented with an order of chicken liver mousse, piped and evenly spread across a slice of brioche complimented with marmalade and garnished with fried sage and maldon (pictured below).
And not a moment too soon, did the all too familiar question of deciding who should get what, when a pre-portioned dish arrives one segment short of being fair occured.
Should 3 slices be cut and portioned to account for who had eaten more that day?
Should 3 slices be cut into 12 micro-portions? Is that absurd or even possible with a butter knife?
How do we account for an allergy to a previously ordered item? Should they get more portions?
Do we allocate one person to cut, one person to distribute, and the other to decide on how it's cut to distribute agency evenly?
We joked at the similarities between AI fairness and the mousse before us; a messy process with a dizzying array of pros and cons. Although our technical challenge only consisted of dividing an American adaptation of a french-inspired appetizer, our contextual questions pulled on familiar challenges of achieving fairness from a technical and ethical angle (the old, building a plane while flying metaphor is fit here).
In the end, we divided the mousse into 6 pieces; leaving a lone piece to be politely fought over near the end of dinner (there's surely a joke that can be made there).
If you're interested in joining conversations like these or inviting others to join these conversations, sign-ups for April are available here & below.
Community Notes
We'll be running our series on our members starting next month. Sign-ups are open here.
Upcoming Events
- A former colleague of mine at New America is helping organize for the NICE conference in collaboration with NIST on cybersecurity resilience in the workforce. The following event is a side-event in the lead up to the full conference in June.
- Securing Tomorrow Together: Building the Keystone State Cybersecurity Workforce, March 20, 2026 1:00 - 3:00pm)
- 2026 NICE Conference & Expo, June 1 -3 2026
See you at our dinner table,
Gabby