Timnit Gebru (she/her).Jun 9, 2023
Here's what I wrote in 2015 when our OpenAI overlords were announced, and after I had a terrible experience at NIPS (a conference now named NeuRIPS after a number of people, mostly women demanded a name change and received death threats for doing so. Interesting to see my reflections from ~8 years ago, not much I'd change except for certain phrases I probably wouldn't use now (e.g. implicit bias).
Show threadTimnit Gebru (she/her).Jun 9, 2023

I struggle to understand Silicon Valley’s libertarians’ allergic reaction to discussing problems caused by the extreme homogeneity of the research circle. The same is true for many in the AI research community of which I am a part. As this thoughtfully written letter to SCOTUS from physicists explains,

The implication that physics or “hard sciences” are somehow divorced from the social realities of racism in our society is completely fallacious.

Show threadTimnit Gebru (she/her).Jun 9, 2023

The exclusion of people from physics solely on the basis of the color of their skin is an outrageous outcome that ought to be a top priority for rectification.

The rhetorical pretense that including everyone in physics class is somehow irrelevant to the practice of physics ignores the fact that we have learned and discovered all the amazing facts about the universe through working together in a community.

Show threadTimnit Gebru (she/her).Jun 9, 2023

The benefits of inclusivity and equity are the same for physics as they are for every other aspect of our world.

The statement holds true for AI and any type of “ism”. One would think that the people trying to “stop AI from harming society” would pay attention to this sort of stuff.

Show threadTimnit Gebru (she/her).Jun 9, 2023
However, amidst the wide acclaim given to Elon Musk and others’ announcement of a “non-profit” venture to “Stop AI from destroying humanity,” only one potential problem has been raised: the fact that all the researchers are working on deep learning.
Show threadTimnit Gebru (she/her).Jun 9, 2023
A White tech tycoon born and raised in South Africa during apartheid, along with an all White all male set of investors and researchers is trying to stop AI from “taking over the world” and the only potential problem we see is that “all the researchers are working on deep learning?”
Show threadTimnit Gebru (she/her).Jun 9, 2023
Google recently came out with a computer vision algorithm that classified black people as Apes. AS APES. Some try to explain away this mishap by stating that the algorithm must have picked out color as an essential discriminator in classifying humans.
Show threadJude
@timnitGebru just unbelievable.
Jun 9, 2023 at 7:17pmWeb