Notices by Timnit Gebru (she/her). (timnitgebru@dair-community.social)

RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116324676116121930

Incredible thread.

Answered some of my questions about what people think the future will be if everyone codes like this. It seems to be: instead of thinking about constraints of any kind or "what is the most efficient way to do Y or the most readable way to do Z?" answer the question, "what is the most brute force way to perform X if I pretend that there are no resource constraints and nothing needs to make sense as long as I see some sort of test passing? Just ship it with spaghetti code.

This "careful" "AI Safety" company that just accidentally leaked its entire source code to the world is the one that African governments are entering into agreements with to include in infrastructures from health care to god knows what.

These are the products people have to use to make sure that they don't get dinged in their performance reviews for "not using AI."

These are the products teachers have to use in schools so that "students aren't left behind."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/01/anthropic-claudes-code-leaks-ai

I appreciated this article by @mttaggart
infosec.exchange.

I get the temptation especially in this world we're all living in where you have to produce something super fast all the time.

But my question is, what are people's arguments for how functioning software can be created with these tools?

What about new architectures, new ways of thinking, new programming languages, etc? Who will create those?

https://taggart-tech.com/reckoning/

I'm not even talking about the data stealing, exploitation, environmental pillaging, pollution, environmental racism etc.

I'm talking about the way people use the tools. Like what do advocates of using these tools say will happen to software engineering in the future? That it just won't need to exist because everyone will be able to create software using these tools?

That it will just take a different form, which is fine?

Thank you for the shoutout Valerie Veatch!

In this interview with The Maybe, she cited the Stochastic Parrots and TESCREAL papers as key sources for the creation of her film, Ghost in the Machine ❤️

https://csm.transistor.fm/episodes/fantasy-factory-one-filmmakers-fight-against-ai-w-valerie-veatch

You can also read @emilymbender comparison of this documentary with the other one, (The AI Doc which I DON"T recommend) on https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/a-tale-of-two-ai-documentaries/.

"Galton and his fellow eugenicist / protegee Karl Pearson were not directly involved in the development of early computational machines. But Galton’s foundational work with multidimensional modeling — a technique he used while measuring the attractiveness of African and European women — shaped Pearson’s thinking as he developed statistical tools like logistic regression, which is one of the fundamental components of modern machine learning."

https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/897923/ghost-in-the-machine-valerie-veatch-interview

I don't remember who said this, but it's like telling you to buy Camels instead of Marlboros while claiming to fight tobacco companies. If any politician parrots talking points of a CEO on a funding round, even on the harms of AI systems, you should be worried.

Remember when Altman schmoozed them and newspapers had headlines of him "begging" to be regulated and hailing him as an Oppenheimer figure who is so worried about his own creation 🙄?

That was just last year! https://time.com/7267797/ai-leaders-oppenheimer-moment-musk-altman/.

You don't believe Altman is such a figure but you think Amodei, who insisted that OpenAI use all 10,000 GPUs and train the biggest model possible, when he was there, is such a figure?

In his video, Bernie is literally creating a Claude ad, showing the system as an all knowing being that answers all of his questions. An ad for Anthropic, a company claiming that they can't even confidently say that "Claude isn't conscious".

A company amassing billions saying they'll at once save us from evil super intelligent machines and build the benevolent super intelligent machine that will solve all of our problems. They're so worried about people not getting "reskilled" because workers are going to be replaced by their machine god that will do our jobs so much better than us. Investors want to hear about machine gods displacing workers because, well, that's how they make money.

Bernie has been repeating, almost verbatim, Dario Amodei's talking points, for a while now, even quote tweeting him. Amodei positions Anthropic as the ethical alternative to OpenAI just like OpenAI positioned itself as the ethical alternative to Google in 2015 and everyone ate it up. This was an article from then, the headline says that Muskrat, Thiel, Altman + friends founded an "altruistic AI venture" 🙄
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35082344

Bernie Sanders just created a video to make a point about issues of privacy in AI (a real problem). His supporters on Muskrat's platform came for me when I quote tweeted his post saying, "at this point, Bernie’s job seems to be lobbying for Anthropic."

So I'm going to elaborate on the corporate psyop that has been happening since the beginning of time and how no one seems to learn their lesson.

Not to toot our own horns but I feel like we packed so much in this one hour panel with Karen Hao and John Palfrey.

You can find the recording at https://www.youtube.com/live/I1tJnM81NCM

Sigh.

Bernie has gone full on "super intelligent AI could become smarter than human beings" and "pose an existential threat to the entire human race." 😫

Literal quote from him. Dude was supposed to be the guy against Silicon Vally CEOs not the one who parrots their propaganda.

RE: https://dair-community.social/@Meron/116199326654385711

As someone who came to the US as a refugee with political asylum I can't overstate how cruel this is. I was already terrified and had nightmares every day. And here they're telling you that you didn't get to safety after all that, that they will reverse your status on a whim, if they deem it safe for you to return. As Warsan Shire wrote, no one leaves home unless home becomes the mouth of a shark.

"Emily [...] says she followed an ICE vehicle at a safe distance into a parking lot. “then someone leaned out of the passenger side of that SUV and took a picture of me and my car,” [...] the SUV made a sudden U-turn and barreled towards her, braking next to her driver's side window. A female agent wearing a gaiter-style mask [...] addressed Emily by name [...] ‘Emily, Emily, we're going to take you home!’ Then she looked at her phone and she recited my home address,”

https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/nx-s1-5717031/ice-has-spun-a-massive-surveillance-web-we-talked-to-people-caught-in-it

Check out this interactive website by Nana Mgbechikwere N., showing BigTech and "AI" companies' media capture.

No wonder the public is getting misinformed.

They say its inspired by Surveillance Watch ❤️

https://nananwachukwu.github.io/media-capture-watch/

Each time I see it happening to current students, I get triggered thinking about my own story. All the work I put in to try and make it better for the next generation, and it's so depressing to see that it's not getting better. It's getting worse.

No Black graduate students means no Black professors and the cycle continues.

You can count how many of us there are with one hand, in the departments I've been in. And still, that's too many for them. That's how few Black people they want. Anything more than zero is too much 😡

No one will say that to you of course. They just place hurdle after hurdle for you instead.

I think back to my own experience and what it took for me not to drop out literally six months before graduation. What I put my body through. What I went through.

If we're not in academia to create safe spaces, Black graduate students get pushed out. If they, by some miracle, finish their PhDs despite the hurdles, it's accompanied by trauma and health issues. Honestly I'm so fed up that I'm trying to figure out if DAIR can create a university of some sort, seriously. Because it's so depressing seeing the state of affairs.

Almost every one of us have been through that. Ω