I’ve mentioned this to a few folks, so I thought I’d post it here in the interests of openness and clarity.
Note: I removed the mention of specific numbers of people who were invited, as it doesn’t affect the main point. Sebastian was kind enough to point out that my memory may have been hazy on those details.
Later in the year, the good folks of the Numata Center for Buddhist Studies at Berkeley Uni are holding a conference on Buddhism and AI. I’ve been somewhat associated with some of the people there over the past few years, as they’re using our data for training. They were kind enough to invite me to speak.
I noticed that almost everyone speaking was a white man. This is an extremely common problem.
I encounter this imbalance, I am not exaggerating, almost every time I am invited to speak at a panel or conference. And every time, I reach out to the organizers to urge them to do better. And also, every time, I have got a reasonable reply, and often some measure of success.
So this time, as is my wont, I reached out to @SebastianN , who I have met through his work with Ven @Vimala on BuddhaNexus, and who has recently moved to Berkeley. We had a nice long chat, during which he reassured me that they encouraged diverse and critical voices.
The next day I get a message from Bob Sharf, a senior faculty member, who acknowledged my “strong concerns”, and told me that he “understands my concerns and completely understands”. I don’t know about you, but reading that gives me the distinct impression that he really doesn’t. He reassured me that I no longer had to worry, as I was no longer invited.
Look, I know nothing about how academia works. So I reached out to a number of friends, asking whether I was being a diva to be upset with this. They assured me I was not, saying things like, “wow!”, “dodged a bullet”, and “completely unprofessional”. A number of respondents indicated that they too had had distressing encounters along similar lines.
A conference of almost entirely white men doesn’t just miss out on the different perspectives of diverse voices, it lacks humanity. It’s just … boring. The same things, again and again. You know, I helped organize my first environmental conference in Perth in about 1985. In those days, Perth was hardly a beacon of diversity. But in organizing the conference I worked with a trans woman, and with an aboriginal Nyoongar elder (Ken Colbung). I can’t really remember much from the conference, but I still remember what I learned from those two.
Which brings up the lack of racial diversity. I mean, come on: this is Berkeley. One Asian guy, seriously? In a religion that has been Asian for 2,500 years? I understand that this is the norm in American Buddhism, but it really shouldn’t be.
It’s also valid to consider the presence of Sangha. We are the traditional custodians of these texts. We created them, edited them, recited them, wrote them down, and maintained them for 2,500 years. We did so because these texts are sacred to us. In modern times, we gladly gifted our scriptures to academics at the Pali Text Society and elsewhere, honored that they took an interest. We raised funds for them to start their centers and to print their books. And we have been thrilled to see the Buddhist texts take their rightful place among the world’s great spiritual literatures.
But we are still the custodians of scriptures. Any Buddhist culture will tell you that. How our texts are used, what happens to them, we deserve a say. Not that I, or anyone else, can represent the entire Sangha. But at least there should be something.
Since disinviting me, they subsequently invited two women to speak, Meghan Howard and Xiaoming Hou. My best wishes for both of them! 
Meghan entered the chat with her response to an earlier announcement about AI translation programs, which she addressed to her academic peers. I’ll end here with her words, with which I am in full agreement, and which she has expressed so eloquently:
As a Buddhist, I feel that machine translations are a violation of the sacredness of the Buddha’s words that rightfully live in the hearts and on the tongues of Buddhist faithful. Sacred scriptures are not a commodity to be harvested by machines, even if they have been treated as such by modern scholars for some time. How many Buddhists are even aware of these developments? Should they not have a say in the fate of their holy texts? You raise the question of potential merit attached to this project. Have you also considered the possibility of sin and suffering?
As a humanist, I am dismayed that ethical considerations—which should be the starting point for an endeavor of this magnitude—seem to have been something of an afterthought. The points you raise in your announcement are insufficient for the gravity of the matter and, moreover, put the cart before the horse. I would ask the members of this list, Do we scholars of the humanities really want to lead the way in displacing the human? On an individual level, do we really want to become “gleaners and cleaners”? Might such a sharp restriction in the scope of our discipline seed its demise? I know I would not have entered graduate school with this future in sight. As a point of comparison, has the era of digital texts produced better scholars than those who came of age reading printed pages?
As a human being who hopes to live a few more decades on this planet and, more importantly, hopes her children will live several more, I despair in the face of this Brave New World in which a small number of people can unilaterally push humanity across yet one more Rubicon, colonizing ever more private recesses of human lives with their insatiable technology. Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should, and we are running out of time to even ask the question.
Unfortunate that this was lost in communication, but happy to hear there isn’t so serious a rift as the OP made it sound 
Thanks for clarifying, Bhante.