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

Reminder that this is tomorrow at 10am PDT/1pm EDT👇🏼

🔇🔇🔇Join us for an honest conversation with some of the people forging a better digital future. Event will be recorded for those who can't make it.

➡️ Register at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/imagining-more-a-candid-convo-about-the-future-of-the-black-web-experience-tickets-1364904469009

More info on our amazing speakers below🧵

Catt Small has worked with companies of all sizes. She started programming interactive games around the age of 10 & has been going ever since. In her spare time, Catt makes awkward video games, writes, and draws artwork of all kinds. You can view her work at https://cattsmall.com.

Ra'il I'Nasah Kiam (@so_treu) is an activist, artist & scholar from Atlanta, & one of the 1st people that identified the growing online threat of white nationalism & hate organizing online. They continue this work in the fediverse. See this convo with them & Artist Marcia X.
https://logicmag.io/policy/blackness-in-the-fediverse-a-conversation-with-marcia-x/

My cousin's friend told me about a lawsuit she's part of. This organization (forgot the name) charged students for coding lessons (I think in javascript). My cousin's friend said that the company used to have office hours, multiple people to ask questions, etc.They then reduced staff to the point that there are no office hours, very few lectures & students are expected to many things on their own and, you guessed it, with the help of "AI."

The students have filed a lawsuit against the company.

I'm thinking about spending some time to write explainers on some topics that people have asked me about. Some would include synthesizing other people's work, some would include our own work etc. Any other topics you'd like to add to the mix?

"McDonald’s tried an AI-driven system for its drive-thrus for three years before ending the effort. During those years, the system made mistakes like trying to add bacon to an ice cream order and giving one customer an order of 260 Chicken McNuggets."

"Despite this dismal success rate, companies are going all-in on AI, driven largely by the belief that everyone else is doing it. Nearly two-thirds of CEOs (64%) say “the risk of falling behind drives them to invest in some technologies before they have a clear understanding of the value they bring to the organization,” according to the study."

https://fortune.com/2025/05/09/klarna-ai-humans-return-on-investment/

"The tech-first-ask-questions-later approach has resulted in some memorable flubs. Air Canada once employed a chatbot that made up a refund policy when chatting with a customer; it was forced to give back $880 to the client despite trying to argue it wasn’t responsible for the bot’s actions."

The oil spill metaphor is elaborated in Section 6 of Chirag Shah and Emily's paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649468.

Sometimes I flag them as spam, other times fake accounts, but given that the platforms themselves encourage people to use chatbots to spam all of us, they don't have it as an option that we can report.

I keep on seeing synthetic text in my comments, for example, which social media platforms actively shove down people's throats. We used to call these things inauthentic coordinated activity to be taken down, but now you have the platforms themselves encouraging everyone to take part in such activities. There was one account I saw that was commenting on posts every minute in different languages.

There are so many fake quotes by me each week that I don't what to do about them. Someone just posted a medium article with another fake quote from me saying "Generative AI is not just about creating something new, but about capturing what was once impossible to express."

If you know anything about my work you know that I would never say something like this.

As @emilymbender said what so called Generative AI has done is basically the equivalent of an oil spill in our information ecosystem.

Great overview and advice in this article by Dia Kayyali for @techpolicypress

Don’t let it become normal

Petra Molnar pointed out in her comments, "Technology is ultimately about power – and reinscribing the power differentials which are inherent in our world generally and in the immigration system specifically.”

https://www.techpolicy.press/ask-the-experts-ai-surveillance-and-us-immigration-enforcement/[

I haven't looked through this guide by TechTonic Justice yet but it looks interesting. Via @alex

"Most of the time, government officials, landlords, employers, educators, and others who use AI to make decisions don’t announce it. This guide is meant to help you figure out if AI is being used and what you can do about it."

https://www.techtonicjustice.org/resources/tips-for-identifying-ai-use

I heard about some pronouncements on "AI" "eradicating all disease" within a decade from one the priests of AGI on 60 minutes--the show which regularly puts out press releases masquerading as journalism (at least as it relates to tech).

And below is another pronouncement from another high priest of AGI. In any other world, people like this would be laughed off. But not in the twilight zone we're living in where they get even more resources and air time.

See Fasica's report at https://data-workers.org/fasica/

I will never forget the genocidal mania among the Ethiopian intelligentsia. It was a popular genocide, with your “progressive” diaspora falling over themselves to deny and justify it. The least we can do is raise awareness about what has happened and what is about to happen.

You can find our work thus far on https://www.dair-institute.org/tigray-genocide/.

We collaborated with content moderators like Fasica to understand the horrific working conditions of moderators.

Imagine your family going through one of the worst sieges in recorded history with nothing going in & out for 2 years, and the longest continuous internet shutdown ever recorded, and moderating genocidal content targeting your people. One of the moderators saw his cousin being murdered because that was a video routed to him. He wasn’t even allowed to take a short mental health break.

But contrary to his claims and Yann LeCun’s lies saying that “95% of hate speech on facebook is removed by ‘AI’,” all social media is essentially 4chan in these languages and contexts.

We have now spent 3 years documenting these failures. We had no language technology to do this–not even the equivalent of a spell checker. So we partnered with Lesan founded by Asmelash Teka to create those tools.

I told people at Google about this, and asked them to build language technology and at the very least, have basic moderation, in so-called "under-resourced languages” like Tigrinya. Although we were at Google, any concerns sent to YouTube went into a void never to even be acknowledged. The same VP who sent an “anonymous” letter to HR telling me to retract my paper and setting the stage for my firing, however, commented that plenty of work was being done in that arena.

🗣️🗣️🗣️ Announcing new work from DAIR which is very close to my heart, 3 years in the making.

When #TigrayGenocide, the deadliest genocide of the 21st century thus far, started in November 2020, it was 1 month before I got fired from Google. Unlike Tigrayans whose sisters were being raped & parents murdered, I didn’t know exactly what was happening on the ground & who to believe. But I saw the genocidal speech targeting Tigrayans on social media, particularly from Eritreans, in Tigrinya. 🧵