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Abeba Birhane Profile
Abeba Birhane

@Abebab

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Senior Advisor, AI Accountability @Mozilla |Cognitive science PhD |Adjunct prof @tcddublinscss , @tcddublin |Ethiopian in Ireland |She/her @abeba .bsky.social

Ethiopia | Ireland
Joined December 2010
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 months
New paper! We evaluated 14 models trained on 400M & 2B samples on classification using CFD as probe. As training data increased, so did the probability of misclassifying human images as offensive classes such as criminal Paper: Code:
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
5 months
who's gonna tell them what the very purpose of creating mind maps is
@HeyAbhishekk
Abhishek
5 months
ChatGPT can now create Mind Maps. No more wasting hundreds of hours making visuals for studying or simplifying complex ideas. Here’s how to do it for free in a few seconds:
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 months
this is insane. they are literally writing their own exam and grading it themselves
@engineers_feed
World of Engineering
3 months
The US government’s AI Safety and Security board.
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
academia to Black women
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
i'm a dr
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
5 years
Academia to black women
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
1 month
whether deliberate or unintentional, the people who want you to treat AI systems as fully autonomous agents are simply laundering responsibility and accountability for the failures/harm from AI into glorified copy-paste machines that can’t know responsibility or accountability
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
5 years
Reverse racism isn't a thing. If you think me pointing out racism in academia is racist, it's because white privilege has taught you not to recognize structural racism and discrimination. It's because your privilege rests on not understanding it.
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
message from my mum who lives in Ethiopia: URGENT, CALL ME! me: what's it mum? mum: I saw the floods on the news in Thailand. did you survive? me: i live in Ireland m: me: m: me: m: you know how similar the sound to normal people. don't you dare be disrespectful me: sorry mum
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
Today is my official first day as an Ethics Research intern with DeepMind 🙌🏾 ☺️
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
Facial recognition tech can do no such thing
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
please forgive me, I was forced to read papers around "AI for Africa" today
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
Facial recognition can do no such thing
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
"trustworthy", "smart" & "privilege" are not things that can be read off faces. this is nothing but a form of machine aided phsygnomy that will be used for insidious purposes which will end up harming those that don't fit social and historical stereotypes
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
just to own reviewer #2 who said my paper demonizes machine learning
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
there. is. no. such. thing. as. unbiased. data. and never can there ever be.
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
longtermism might be one of the most influential ideologies that few people outside of elite universities & Silicon Valley ever heard abt. as a former longtermist, I have come to see this worldview as most dangerous secular belief system in the world today
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
I was in the process of being hired (part-time) at a Scandinavian university towards the end of last year & experienced one of the most distressing & draining cases of racism (will not name the university, department or individuals to protect those that fought for me) thread 1/
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
Today I asked a new cohort of about 30 ML PhD students to assume they were given these tasks by their employers and how they would respond. These questions raised heated debates 🔥🔥🔥 and the class went on way longer than anticipated
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
over a year ago, i commented on how big tech might take African language datasets, collected and curated by underfunded and overworked African researchers and i was dismissed as 'alarmist' 1/
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
6 years
How to make a racist AI without really trying "... the sentiment is generally more positive for stereotypically-white names, & more negative for stereotypically-black names." I urge you to read this if you do sentiment analysis of any sort.
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
when you put theft in context, the poor are robbed the most
@transrightsrose
Rose 💙💗🤍💗💙 says TRANS RIGHTS
4 years
If this doesn't radicalize you, look at it again.
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
How it How it’s started going
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
3 weeks ago LAION-400M dataset (now a billion+), first Image-Alt-text pair dataset of this scale was released. @vinayprabhu , @MannyKayy & I dug into it Long tread 1/ Warning: paper contains NSFW content that may be disturbing, distressing &/or offensive
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
📢New paper out in Artificial Life journal 📢 This paper is central to my PhD thesis, it brings together embodied & enactive cog sci & complex systems to argue that ML predictive systems are scientifically problematic and ethically dubious.
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
🙌🏾🙏🏾❤️
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
the road to total tech-surveillance is paved with convenience
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
I can't even with this one
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
1 year
we do. we wrote about 2 major undersea cables in Africa owned by Google & Meta explaining how they 1) physically follow the transatlantic slave trade route & 2) ideologically constitute a new form of digital colonialism. our paper was rejected cuz it doesn't reference Western lit
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
5 years
My paper "Algorithmic Injustice: towards a relational ethics" just won the @black_in_ai Best Paper Award at @NeurIPSConf and I'm shook! Absolutely speechless!!! #NeurIPS2019
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
📣 some personal news 📣 today i officially start at mozilla foundation as a senior fellow 🙌🏾 😊 looking forward sharing more over the coming year
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
8 months
me & my collaborators have done the most extensive research of the LAION datasets (3 academic papers & the first to investigate dataset in 2021 showing misogyny, pornography, & malignant stereotypes) yet, the Stanford study has not cited us once. this is academic misconduct
@samleecole
Samantha Cole
8 months
big breaking news: LAION just removed its datasets, following a study from Stanford that found thousands of instances of suspected child sexual abuse material
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
. @NatureComms , you are responsible for reinstating long discredited pseudoscience by publishing physiognomy. Retract this pseudoscience immediately.
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
5 years
"Where are you from? England. But where are you originally from? Originally, I am from loving parents." The best thing I heard today
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
21 days
I'm sick sick sick of the current genAI hype. waiting for the day the word genAI is understood and normalised for what it is: labour extractive, environmentally destructive, and intellectually mediocre
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
Nothing scares me as much as seeing naive engineers with no knowledge of structural injustice, pervasive power asymmetries, or conservative and racist history of the field of AI, being endowed with the power to make tech that infiltrates the social sphere.
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
1 year
extremely thrilled and honoured to be on this list 🙌🏾
@TIME
TIME
1 year
TIME's new cover: The 100 most influential people in AI
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
1 year
argh! (different generative models, similar outcome)
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
5 years
Face recognition technology
@BrentToderian
Brent Toderian
5 years
QUESTION: If you had the power to ban just one thing from cities in order to make them MUCH better, OTHER THAN CARS (too easy), what would that one thing be?
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
"Computational and cognitive sciences are built on a foundation of racism, sexism, colonialism, Anglo and Euro-centrism, white supremacy, and all intersections thereof" New preprint from @o_guest and yours truly.
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
I'm I doing this right
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
I'm tired of people claiming "AI benefits society" without acknowledging that benefits and harms are distributed unevenly
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
My TL a few tweets apart. Nobody does firing in retaliation as well as big tech corporations
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 months
imagine, I start saying nonsensical shit like "AI will solve all of cognition and it can actually do that"? id be asked to provide evidence left and right and lose credibility as a scientist. why do we let the likes of Altman get away with grift
@tsarnick
Tsarathustra
2 months
Sam Altman says the day is approaching when we can ask an AI model to solve all of physics and it can actually do that
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
Every tech-evangelist: #GPT3 provides deep nuanced viewpoint Me: GPT-3, generate a philosophical text about Ethiopia GPT-3 *spits out factually wrong and grossly racist text that portrays a tired and cliched Western perception of Ethiopia* (ht @vinayprabhu )
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
The tech space is full of men who have no idea of the history of their field, leading to stupid comments like this... and every now and again, you have men like this who show the true colour of the field by saying things out loud
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
7 years
You had me at "data are". #AcademicValentines
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
I'll start. Evolutionary psychology.
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
Some exciting personal news: it's now official that I will be joining the DeepMind ethics team in London as Ethics Research Intern in January for a number of months.
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
do you know what's more dangerous than bad AI? the current culture that promotes blind faith in AI. people just lose their sense of reasoning and critical thinking when presented with claims of AI being able to do this or that, even the seemingly sensible ones
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
screams in cognitive science
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
10 months
I'm thrilled to be selected as one of UN's inaugural AI Advisory Body to support the international community’s efforts to govern artificial intelligence.
@UNTechEnvoy
United Nations Envoy on Technology
10 months
Today, @UnitedNations Secretary-General @antonioguterres launched his AI Advisory Body. The Body will focus on: 🔹Risks and challenges of AI 🔹 Enablers & opportunities for the #SDGs 🔹 International governance of AI Find out more :
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 months
argh
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@ASE
AHMED | أحمد
4 months
Google has now internally censored the word "genocide". The word "genocide" is now against Google's internal corporate Community Guidelines You can't make this up. 🤷🏽‍♂️
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
1 year
asking big tech ceos about the risks of AI is like asking tobacco companies about the risks of smoking
@POTUS
President Biden
1 year
Artificial Intelligence is one of the most powerful tools of our time, but to seize its opportunities, we must first mitigate its risks. Today, I dropped by a meeting with AI leaders to touch on the importance of innovating responsibly and protecting people's rights and safety.
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
No. Tha answer is no
@ForbesTech
Forbes Tech
4 years
The Pentagon’s $1 million question: Can AI predict an enemy’s emotions? By @iblametom
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
gentle reminder: all large language models are good at is predict the next word in a sequence based on previous words they've seen. that's all. there's no understanding of meaning whatsoever
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
Our ( @radical_ai_ , @dallascard , @willie_agnew , @DotanRavit , @TheMichelleBao & I) preprint is up on ArXiv (paper currently under review) Paper: The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research Code and supplementary material: 1/
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
Algorithmic injustice: a relational ethics approach New paper fresh off the press! 🥳🥳🥳
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
I have a joke about Black women in academia but you'll find the tone too aggressive
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
I'm begging tech bros to take basic lessons on human brains, behaviour and cognition. When someone starts with "the brain is just...", you know it is a gross simplification but this one is catastrophically wrong too
@ilyasut
Ilya Sutskever
2 years
Given that the brain is just a bunch of big matrix vector products, linear algebra deserves more appreciation
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
Artificial Intelligence, A Guide for Thinking Humans — Melanie #Mitchell #amreading
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
11 months
"The vast majority of computer vision research leads to technology that surveils human beings, a new preprint study that analyzed more than 20,000 CV papers and 11,000 patents spanning three decades has found." thanks @404mediaco for covering our paper
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
What's something that seems scientific but isn't?
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
@bodamianrapsody @evan_greer "this is no different from someone seeing you from their front window" he says watching a video of a kid being broadcast to the world
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 months
this is called constant surveillance, monitoring, and tracking and it will eventually be used to influence and control the masses
@tsarnick
Tsarathustra
3 months
Satya Nadella says Windows PCs will have a photographic memory feature called Recall that will remember and understand everything you do on your computer by taking constant screenshots
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
5 years
Dear men of twitter, This platform would be a much pleasant space if you could refrain from making irrelevant, condescending, and pointless responses to every tweet women post. Thank you!
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 months
Joseph Weizenbaum (1972) the last sentence!
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@tsarnick
Tsarathustra
3 months
Sam Altman says increasing AI capabilities will require some change to the social contract, "the whole structure of society itself will be up for some degree of debate and reconfiguration"
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
I don't know who needs to hear this but 'I am apolitical' is a political statement
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
5 years
Preprint for our paper ‘Robot Right? Let’s Talk about Human Welfare Instead’ is up on arXiv . @theblub & I argue not just to deny robots ‘rights’, but to deny that robots are the kinds of things that could be granted rights in the first place. 1/
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
AI can absolutely NOT do such a thing
@itsnicethat
It's Nice That
3 years
Can AI imagine the next victims of police violence? Future Wake explores injustice through code >
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
7 months
very soon, synthetic content will pollute the entire www, like a toxic waste
@sama
Sam Altman
7 months
openai now generates about 100 billion words per day. all people on earth generate about 100 trillion words per day.
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
this is a horrible move. AI/robots CAN'T detect lies. looks like even the EU falls for AI snake oil.
@jamesvgingerich
James Gingerich #B2B #Technology #Influencer
2 years
The EU is putting lie detector robots on its borders. (Now This) #Robotics #AI
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
most academics don't like actual interdisciplinary work, just the idea of it
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
If senior professors in position of power can outright attack me like this and alter my career paths, just imagine the trauma, obstacles and frustration other (less outspoken/those who prefer to remain quiet) Black scholars go through as they navigate academia. End/
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
when you solve the harmful and negative societal consequences of algorithmic decision-making by "debiasing" your dataset
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
8 months
Google has agreed to settle a $5bn class action lawsuit for invading the privacy of users by tracking them even when they were browsing in "private mode".
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 months
take it down. it's the best and most sensible solution
@SeamusBlackley
Seamus Blackley
3 months
CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
You might think it's just one person, but he is a symptom of much larger rotten ecology that is academia, esp historically white dominated depts Given the powerful position he holds, it pains me to think that things are unlikely to change & the environment will remain toxic 10/
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
it's astounding how much of current "algorithmic (un)fairness" literature assumes there's an uncontested "fair" dataset/representation/ground truth out there
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 months
so apt
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
Race "sciences" (Racism, more accurately)
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
Dear the ML/AI community, DO NOT research autism without autistic people DO NOT research disability without disabled people DO NOT research race without people from historically marginalized races DO NOT research gender without intersectional feminist theories Thank you!
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
let's ditch the common narrative that "AI is a tool that promotes and enhances human prosperity" (whatever that means) & start with the assumption that AI is a tool that exacerbates inequality & injustice & harms the most marginalized unless people actively make sure it doesn't
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
"Do they Know it's Christmas" is racist and patronizing. stop playing it
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
just processing the news that our paper "The Values Encoded in Machine Learning" has been awarded the best paper at #FAccT22 and absolutely speechless grateful for the team 💜
@WellsLucasSanto
wells santo @ homo luddites
2 years
I want to give a HUGE shout-out to @Abebab @ria_kalluri @dallascard @willie_agnew @dotanravit @TheMichelleBao for getting Best Paper at #FAccT22 for "The Values Encoded In Machine Learning Research"!! An incredible paper from an *incredible* team!
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
1 year
there is no such thing as brain correlates of homosexuality. this is unscientific with a disastrous implication in countries where homosexuality is illegal. just let people be or let people identify their own sexuality
@wesyang
Wesley Yang
1 year
AI was able to detect homosexuality by observing the electrical activity of brains with 83 percent accuracy
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
we have arrived at peak AI hype accompanied by minimal critical thinking
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
The field of AI
@activisthistory
Jen Manion, PhD 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🍕🏖
4 years
What's it called when a group that is 90% white say they have no bias?
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
"aligning AI with human values" often amounts to "aligning AI with the values of the status quo" (certainly not with the values of the most impacted by AI) so long as we fail to scrutinize which humans we are talking about
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 years
Petition to replace "bias" with "harm", "injustice", "oppression" or other appropriate terms that reflect the depth of these problems in algorithmic systems.
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
6 months
the AI industry is destroying the environment (massive energy consumptions, tons of gallons of water for data centres) while systemically concealing such information. I'm grateful for journalists like @_KarenHao doing the crucial investigative work. excellent thread
@_KarenHao
Karen Hao
6 months
A big question looms over generative AI: what really is its impact on the environment? I spent months investigating a single campus of Microsoft data centers in the Arizona desert - designated in part for OpenAI - in an attempt to find out. Thread.
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 years
@ylecun Pretty much exactly what happened was you overhyped and released a model. People tested it (you should be thankful for us as it's your job to do this before release) and demonstrated that not only does it fail to stand up to your hype, but it is also dangerous.
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
It's dystopian only when China does it
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 years
Addressing the legacy of eugenics in statistics will require asking many such difficult questions. Pretending to answer them under a veil of objectivity serves to dehumanize like the rhetoric of eugenics that facilitated practices like forced sterilization
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
2 months
a gem of a paper with real-world impact. audit of an algorithm that the Danish child protective services wants to deploy shows the algorithm is not fit for purpose and should not be deployed. read and amplify
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
1 year
I repeat: let the tech industry establish guardrails and self-regulate is equivalent to expecting the tobacco industry to do cancer research and self-regulate
@MeetThePress
Meet the Press
1 year
WATCH: Former Google CEO @ericschmidt tells #MTP Reports the companies developing AI should be the ones to establish industry guardrails — not policy makers. “There’s no way a non-industry person can understand what’s possible.”
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
3 months
“we find that while the term open source is widely used, many models are ‘open weight’ at best and many providers seek to evade scientific, legal and regulatory scrutiny by withholding information on training and fine-tuning data.” this paper is 🔥🔥🔥
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
1 year
*screams in cognitive science* no, AI does not learn the same way we do
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
4 months
let them eat compute
@tsarnick
Tsarathustra
4 months
Sam Altman says instead of Universal Basic Income, there should be Universal Basic Compute, where everybody gets a slice of GPT-7's compute
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@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
23 days
New paper where @bayesianboy , @andrewthesmart , and I outline how machine learning is laundering long discredited harmful pseudoscience and offer resources for research best practices to developers/practitioners
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