Timnit Gebru

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Timnit Gebru (Amharic and Tigrinya: ትምኒት ገብሩ; 1982/1983) is an Eritrean Ethiopian-born computer scientist who works in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithmic bias and data mining. She is a co-founder of Black in AI, an advocacy group that has pushed for more Black roles in AI development and research. She is the founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR).

Quotes

Timnit Gebru on her firing from Google, the risks of AI, and biases in big tech

‎Interview: Timnit Gebru on her dismissal from Google, the risks of AI, and biases in big tech

• Feels like a gold rush.
• A lot of the people who are making money are not the people actually in the midst of it.
• It’s humans who decide whether all this should be done or not.
• We should remember that we have the agency to do that.
• Impacts people all over the world and they don’t get to have a say on how they should shape it.
• Overrepresent hegemonic viewpoints and encode biases potentially damaging to marginalised populations.
• You don’t want someone like me who’s going to get in your way.
• I think it made it really clear that unless there is external pressure to do something different, companies are not just going to self regulate.
• We need regulation and we need something better than just a profit motive.
• I’ve met so many people like you who think that they can just come here from other countries and take the hardest classes.
• I was being attacked by a bunch of guys, and nobody helped me at all.
• That was the scariest thing.

Five Questions with Timnit Gebru

‎5 Questions For Timnit Gebru

• We aim to expose the harms of the current AI system, serving as an early warning system to stop their spread.
• We focus on where AI tools are being experimented with before they get to the rest of the society and uncover what happens to the people.
• My hope is that our work counteracts the drive to centralize power and disenfranchise human beings.
• AI tools that actually help people and not try to replace them.
• The primary motivation with all of these AI technologies is either to have more warfare or to have more profit.
• I want a different kind of root motivation for technology that puts human welfare first.
• That’s not the world I want to live in.
• I want to live in a world where we’re not trying to disenfranchise humans or devalue labor.
• I want to live in a world where instead of there being one company in one place in the world with one dominant model.
• We have many people who are each working to support their communities in some way and sharing profits back.

9 Powerful One-Sentence Quotes on Analytics and AI

9 Powerful One-Sentence Quotes on Analytics and AI23 October,2024

• Generative AI is not just about creating something new, but about capturing what was once impossible to express.”

Timnit Gebru: Building ethical AI demands systemic and organizational reform

Timnit Gebru: Building ethical AI demands systemic and organizational reform 26 May,2022

• What I’ve realized is that we can talk about the ethics and fairness of AI all we want, but if our institutions don’t allow for this kind of work to take place, then it won’t.”
• “Even at places like Stanford, we have too much concentrated power that is impacting the world, and yet the world has no opportunity to affect how technology is being developed."