📢This Monday I’ll be moderating a conversation with these amazing women doing data work & researching its impacts: Kauna, Ranta, Fasica (
@Fasica2024
) & Mila (
@MilagrosMiceli
).
⏱️9am PT/5pmCET.
➡️Zoom:
➡️Twitch:
More info👇🏼🧵
Never in my life have I seen a world sanctioned genocide in full display, being livetweeted & live streamed, with officials not even hiding their intentions, and people condemning it being attacked in full force. Usually genociders take some effort to hide what they're doing.
I think it is helpful to read other cases of genocide denial if you want to help yourself figure out what to engage with and what not to engage with. The talking points are exactly the same. All genocides work the same.
Wow this reporter who broke the story is A FRESHMAN.
Doing the work that the institution's leaders should have been doing, and exposing the issues with their investigation even after he did their work for them.
BREAKING: Stanford president to resign his post, retract “at least” 3 papers, after our reporting in
@StanfordDaily
exposed multiple papers with data manipulation and his refusal to retract studies when given opportunities over the course of 2 decades.
Not even 24 hrs after making history as the first company to mass fire workers for pro-Palestine protests, google announced that the “(ir)responsible AI org” they announced after firing me, is now reporting up the Israeli office.
Clearly backing this genocide seems priority.
Do you understand why this is bad? You perform experiments with some of the most vulnerable people and are casually explaining that you did this without their consent?
If you talk about toxic workplace conditions, a lot of the leaders will want you out. If a lot of the leaders want you out, they'll find a way to make it happen. If you're a harasser, thats not the case. A lot of the leaders will be A-ok with you being around.
We received this heartbreaking email by someone who was falsely accused of using "AI" to generate an essay & got a ZERO on their assignment. How many people's lives are being ruined like this? This should be unacceptable. Are there any journalists investigating stuff like this?
You know these last 2 weeks were supposed to be my vacations and we’re currently on a road trip. Trying to find my email with my conditions that were so unacceptable to them, but one of them is basically point
#1
here:
@mmbronstein
It’s the privilege you have that allows you to believe that things are not political. Because your politics is the status quo, making it easy for you to feel like you’re “apolitical” while making deeply political choices and statements.
Seeing the entire weight of the western empire machinery descend to commit this genocide and silnce and criminalize anyone against it is really something to behold.
Apparently my manager’s manager sent an email my direct reports saying she accepted my resignation. I hadn’t resigned—I had asked for simple conditions first and said I would respond when I’m back from vacation. But I guess she decided for me :) that’s the lawyer speak.
I was on adrenaline until now and hadn't really processed everything. What I'm thinking today is that if this is happening to me, with an incredibly supportive team+manager (who is also a director) & a lot of visibility, what are they doing to other Black women?
I have my PhD in "AI" & spent my career in tech as an engineer & then researcher. The skills required to understand how a system harms society aren't the same as those required to build it.
Ppl don't need to know how face recognition works to know that it harms them.
Full stop— We can’t prevent algorithmic bias in innovative tech if POC don’t have a seat at the table.
@RonWyden
and I urged
@Google
CEO
@sundarpichai
to reaffirm his commitment to D&I and academic freedom. Now more than ever,
@timnitGebru
’s departure makes this work essential.
The San Francisco I know has been obliterated by the tech bros. All the places I used to go for dancing closed. Homelessness like I’ve never seen. They keep on talking about “innovation” in the Bay Area when we don’t even have a functioning public transportation system.
The future of AI is happening right now in San Francisco. Businesses are starting here & the talent to build what’s next is here. We're focused on creating a safe, welcoming, thriving City to foster the next great ideas & create long-term economic success.
@ubiquity75
@jack
“I hired too many of those people working on accessibility, human rights & ethics too fast and the manchild who wants to extend the light of consciousness got rid of them and he’s right.”
Can we abolish billionaires yet?
Is there anyone working on regulation protecting Ethical AI researchers, similar to whistleblower protection? Because with the amount of censorship & intimidation that goes on towards people in specific groups, how does anyone trust any real research in this area can take place?
An immunocompromised person in my family got COVID for the first time, AT THE HOSPITAL because they stopped requiring ANY PRECAUTIONS. No masks, no nothing.
They can't avoid the hospital so that means they'll just have to roll the dice each time they go?
What a cruel world.
Meg Mitchell, lead of the Ethical AI team has been fired. She got an email to her personal email. After locking her out for 5 weeks.
There are many words I can say right now. I'm glad to know that people don't fall for any of their bull.
To the VPs at google, I pity you.
What happened today here, platforms like
@Facebook
@YouTube
and
@Twitter
have been facilitating a lot of that in countries that are not considered "important" with unfettered misinformation, hate speech and what have you.
Thank you Time for having me on this list. And I had no idea the one and only
@safiyanoble
was the one who was going to write a piece.
Thank you so much for all of your support sis publicly and behind the scenes.
This is my 3rd time trying to watch this video & I've still only made it to 5 mins. The doctor talking about how the world "just watches us" while people are dying. I just don't understand how this has gone on for this long with no action from the world.
It really irritates me that my research agenda has to be based on what tech bros decide to chase. They get $$$ chase X, X gets proliferated, then we spend all our time analyzing and mitigating the harms of X. We never wanted to build X, that was never in our research agenda,
New York stands with the people of Israel as they face a horrific attack by Iran.
We are not aware of any domestic threats. As a precautionary measure,
@nyspolice
,
@NationalGuardNY
&
@NYSDHSES
are on high alert to protect houses of worship and high-profile locations.
So its not when white supremacists march chanting "Jews will not replace us" that you realize antisemitism is bad, but when Israel is carpet bombing Palestinians, Palestinian students are shot in the US, & anyone, including Jews, speaking up against that is labeled antisemitic?
for a long time i said that antisemitism, particularly on the american left, was not as bad as people claimed.
i'd like to just state that i was totally wrong.
i still don't understand it, really. or know what to do about it.
but it is so fucked.
From 2018:
"When Artificial Intelligence works as intended, Silicon Valley types often say it's "like magic".
But it isn't magic. It's Brenda, a 26-year-old single mother who lives Kibera...In her eight-hour shift, she creates training data."
I said here are the conditions. If you can meet them great I’ll take my name off this paper, if not then I can work on a last date. Then she sent an email to my direct reports saying she has accepted my resignation. So that is google for you folks. You saw it happen right here.
I. Am. Livid. Two Black women,
@IfeomaOzoma
and
@erikashimizu
, risk everything. They go public giving the COO the ability to then tell her story. Pinterest settles with COO for $22.5 million. And they got LESS THAN A YEAR'S SEVERANCE?
Rage at what these racists did to Claudine Gay. Couldn’t even keep a Black woman as president for one year without harassing & stalking her out.
They have the most unbelievably horrific white men at the highest levels of leadership but Black women? Of course not.
When your org is quiet it means people are afraid to complain--not that things are better. The point of the brain women and allies list was for people to be able to discuss issues, and Samy tried to protect me from retaliation. If people in your org are quiet--they're scared.
Y'all fall for their dog and pony show while they're doing this. OpenAI says its "impossible" to comply with the regulation why?
1) Because you can't NOT steal people's data?
2) Because your entire business model depends on 1?
“Elon is the singlular solution I trust”
Jack Dorsey.
Makes sense. Billionaires convince eachother that they’resaving humanity.
That’s why this longtermism and effective altruism bullshit is a religion in this valley to convince themselves that they’re saving the world.
I have ZERO confidence that there will an "investigation" or any action whatsoever planned by any Google leader. What they're planning on instead is waiting it out and doing nothing since they believe the story will die down.
We received feedback from a grant application that included "While your impact metrics & thoughtful approach to addressing systemic issues in AI are impressive, some reviewers noted the inherent risks of navigating this space without alignment with larger corporate players,"
The news from Tigray is that professors are dying of hunger, journalists are falling in their studios from hunger, doctors are fainting while treating patients & this is not in the rural areas which only god knows what’s happening.
A genocide is unfolding with leaders clearly communicating their intentions & green lit by“international community”. Announcing a siege of 2M already besieged ppl, prime minister live tweeting bombing residential buildings, “human animals.” The West’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.
There is something to be said for Google saying they care about AI ethics & diversity, trying to say they're publishing in this area, highlighting a number of papers to prove their point, and seeing that the author list contains ZERO people from underrepresented racial groups.
This chat is how I found out I was resignated. From my direct report in shock who was trying to reach me. I then informed my manager Samy after she informed me. She had just joined our team in May.
@JeffDean
there are no words left to describe this & your subsequent gasligthing
@hima_lakkaraju
This is truly unreal, & after you submitted your reviews? And ONLY one day late? The audacity that they have to say this. This person should be disqualified from holding these positions. Unfortunately these are the people running academia and controlling grad student's lives.
The audacity of Google leaders to be angry about leaks cause they want to have "honest conversations."
Hilarious. Bruh you fired me for trying just that. Internally. You know how much stuff I could've leaked to the press over the years. Did I? No. And You fired & smeared me 1\
The sheer racism. The absolute, acceptance we are supposed to have for the unquestioned assumption that white lives are to be valued much more than anyone else’s lives, called “human animals.” The outrage ppl come with for daring to suggest otherwise. It is absolutely disgusting.
I may have said this before, but being "the bigger person," making all sorts of calculations of what to say/do not say/do so as to not burn bridges, keep organizations functional, not ruining careers etc, makes us pay internally. I know this for a fact for myself.
The children of Tigray have been starving and disconnected from the world since November 2020. No food, no phone, no medicine, no hope.
And now they're being bombed. What a horrible world.
Web Summit CEO was forced to resign over these comments. Over this tweet:
“shocked at the rhetoric and actions of so many Western leaders & governments, with the exception in particular of Ireland’s government, who for once are doing the right thing. ”
.
@eLife
the journal who fired their editor in chief for assuming Palestinians are human (huge mistake), seems to have funding from Max Plank Society. Someone emailed us anonymously given the type of terror Palestinians face in Germany, the country that insists on staying fascist.
I got this exact comment after a lecture I gave at Caltech. And it was from a prof who was instrumental in creating computer vision datasets lol.
If you want to know why computer scientists are destroying the world while making bank & having the illusion of being “apolitical”.
I don’t remember what year when Elon Musk visited Stanford & told us that self driving cars were a solved problem already, 6+ yrs ago. To have the confidence of a tech bro who gets rich from tax subsidies, runs his factories like a plantation & threatens to leave when called out.
I still can't tell if they knew this level of backlash was coming and calculated that its too important to get me out really fast and better to suffer the consequences, whether its bad PR, people leaving or what, or if they just didn't see it coming.
These racists make my blood boil. Not only was the person in question harassing protestors and STEPPING ON THEM, multiple people were doing exactly what this young man did and they picked the Black one to evict. Stay racist
@Harvard
. Stay racist.
Harvard is evicting a Black man, Elom Tetty-Tamaklo, for speaking out about Palestine. His crime? Protecting students from an instigator who tried to dox them. A senior university leader called Elom a “gang” member and pointed to his residence in Harvard Yard.
The university
When some of the most sexist men get together and talk about "artificial general intelligence" benefiting "all of humanity"
y'all can't even work with women without driving them out of the field and talk about "all of humanity"
Apolitical Oxford computer science professor Michael Bronstein has finally blocked me after constantly being compelled to comment on my posts on the genocide of Palestinians by "apolitically" mentioning stuff like this.
I'll put it in the hall of fame along with the other men.
I think, along with our papers that are taught in classes, what Google did to our team is also going to be taught in classes as a case study of what NOT to do in this space.
How can we let it be known far & wide that there's a religion in Silicon Valley (longtermism/effective altruism & similar) that has convinced itself that the best thing to do for "all of humanity" is to throw as much money as possible to the problem of "AGI"...
Horrible to use Black women as shields in all this corporate diversity speak that we know is not working. We see the numbers. Its not working. And they have Black women answering for the company on why I was dismissed. Its cringe worthy.
I’m sick of this framing. Tired of it. Many people have tried to explain, many scholars. Listen to us. You can’t just reduce harms caused by ML to dataset bias.
ML systems are biased when data is biased.
This face upsampling system makes everyone look white because the network was pretrained on FlickFaceHQ, which mainly contains white people pics.
Train the *exact* same system on a dataset from Senegal, and everyone will look African.
That AIPAC isn't registered as a foreign agent while spending $100M to openly harass candidates on behalf of a foreign genocidal government, but all we hear about are "election interference" from Russia and China, is wild 🙄
This man is "investigated", ppl tag his employers to fire him, tag funders to pull $$, call on him to resign as EIC, & he deleted his Twitter account. All because he showed support for Palestinians while noting that he is Jewish with family in Israel & condemning Hamas's attacks.
By
@nitashatiku
.
“The rising Hindu nationalist movement that has spread from India through the diaspora has arrived inside Google, according to employees.”
This issue is not getting the widespread attention it deserves.
Whats on my mind is the haunting images of starving children, the knowledge that this is potentially happening to 1.8M people and that its human made famine right this moment in 2021. I shudder to think of the scale of the unfolding crisis
#StopTigrayFamine
#AirDropFoodForTigray
Elon Musk, a White man who grew up in apartheid South Africa, sends an email telling people who've consistently been called the N-word, in a company that doesn't promote Black people, to "have a thick skin."
When will these tech bros be held accountable?
"Our analysis shows that 52% of ChatGPT answers are incorrect and 77% are verbose...ChatGPT answers are still preferred 39.34% of the time due to their comprehensiveness and well-articulated language style."
Great that Stack Overflow is being destroyed by OpenAI +friends.
Soo, ChatGPT, which is definitely not three stochastic parrots in a trench coat, is not only bad at coding but also really good at making people think that it's good at it.
"Today I informed my colleagues that I have resigned from the State Department, due to a policy disagreement concerning our continued lethal assistance to Israel."
Senior State Department Official Resigns Over Biden's Gaza Policy
People were checking in on me making sure I'm eating.
@IfeomaOzoma
even reminded me to hydrate :) This is reminding me of how when I joined Google, I lost 10 pounds in less than a month because of the toxicity I immediately met./1
I just wrote this email.
"Thanks for sending this to me. I unfortunately don't have much time to get into this but this is a very dangerous type of work. The issue with trying to look at someone's face and determining whether they are a criminal or not is not trying to...
One of the results of misinformation coming out of Google is being accused of demanding to know the names of anonymous reviewers in a peer review process? Why does everyone assume that there is anonymous peer review at google? That is NOT a thing. This is all so unreal.
.
@eventbrite
just censored our upcoming event with
@palyouthmvmt
to discuss the connections between Palestinian liberation and Black liberation, and to plan ways to take action against our shared oppression.
Hilarious that OpenAI and Microsoft get to specify that people can’t use their products to create competing products, given that they’ve been building their products to compete against millions of people off of stolen work.
OpenAI and Microsoft say it's against their rules to use their GPT APIs to build a competing AI model.
It turns out that ByteDance has been doing exactly that to build its own LLM in China. As a person with firsthand knowledge of the situation put it, “They say they want to
People starving to death in front of our eyes, tweeting they prefer to die from drone strikes instead of starvation. We watch unable to do anything. We watch the world
@UN
@_AfricanUnion
etc just sit back & watch.
We watch as there's barely any news coverage.
#EndTigraySiege
Being a Black woman means you get a PhD in a field, do award winning research & such & white dudes come over & ask you to show your receipts & compare yourself to cult leaders writing blogposts who have people worshipping their self proclaimed high IQ & talk about bombing things.
@timnitGebru
Yudkowsky is not working on machine learning and AI development research. Are you? How many of the people in that panel are? How many of them working on frontier models?
Eliezer is certainly working on developing and communicating his ideas about existential risk from AGI/ASI.
I love how today has been reclaimed as a day of celebration :) Thank you all for your support. I'm gonna write a thread right after this talk at
@WomeninAIEthics
This is what I plan to be working on for a while: , which you can also follow
@DAIRInstitute
Well, its official. I have now signed up to write a WHOLE BOOK 😲
I am equal parts excited and terrified. But I couldn't ask for a better team than my agents Sarah, Katherine, and Anna, and editors Alessandra and Leo.
I guess I better get to work now!
You know what kills me? While
@MIT
is incessantly harassing them right now, years from now they'll use this as a recruitment tool. I remember when they talked about Black students' sit-ins at Stanford in the late 60s as if the administration welcomed them with flowers and candy.
Happening right NOW at MIT. Anti-war protestors calling for a ceasefire and an end to preventable civilian loss of life are being physically attacked, harassed, threatens by MIT administration with suspension. More footage in replies.
#MIT
Imagine establishing a
@UN
body dealing with internet connectivity & human rights, holding its gathering in a country putting 6M ppl in one of the longest internet shutdowns in history—TWO YEARS. That’s what
@intgovforum
is. Chaired by
@vgcerf
“father of the internet”
Shameful.
"Why would you, a CEO or executive at a high-profile technology company...proclaim how worried you are about the product you are building and selling?
Answer: If apocalyptic doomsaying about the terrifying power of AI serves your marketing strategy."
"AI-art generators are trained on enormous datasets, containing millions upon millions of copyrighted images, harvested without their creator’s knowledge, let alone compensation or consent. This is effectively the greatest art heist in history. "
Surreal to see big shot Ethiopians doing analysis on Ukraine and the impacts it will have on the world’s food supplies etc while pretending a genocide isn’t happening in their backdoor where 7M people are being starved. Horrible lifelong lessons learned in the last 15 months.
"OpenAI has made GPT-3 available as a paid service but has not shared the model itself or its code....OpenAI declined an invitation to comment on Meta’s announcement."
😂😂😂
Isn't this like the most ironic thing ever? What's the "Open" part of Open AI?
Thank you to the Guardian for publishing this opinion piece that I wrote. The title I had in mind was “To reduce the harms of AI, we need to increase worker power” which is then gist of the piece.
Solidarity with the people of Ukraine but the manner in which it’s covered vs how we’re depicted is a constant and painful reminder that we are not considered human, and so very clearly so.
A statement from my manager Samy who was horrified by the whole thing—they deliberately kept him out of the loop (he found out from ME that his manager Megan had sent me an email to my personal account, cause she had cuttoff my Corp access, terminating me
Read her statement and read these claims below, including having HER FACE AND EMAIL broadcast, telling people to email her and contact her at this address, after she loses her job offer. It is a crime to value Palestinian lives in the USA.
NYU Law student Ryna Workman loses prestigious job offer after penning a horrifying justification for the murder, rape, and kidnapping of Jews in a school newsletter.
Thank you
@WinstonLaw
for doing the right thing and breaking ties with this atrocious antisemite.
I would post my email here but my corp account has been cutoff. I feel bad for my teammates but for me its better to know the beast than to pretend.
@negar_rz
didn't even have any idea things had escalated this quickly.