“There were no Black people — literally no Black people,” says Gebru, who was born and raised in Ethiopia. “I would go to academic conferences in AI, and I would see four or five Black people out of five, six, seven thousand people internationally.… I saw who was building the AI systems and their attitudes and their points of view. I saw what they were being used for, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, we have a problem.’”
Fantastic article. As a data scientist who’s been exposed to and worked with various forms of AI and ML for quite some time, it’s always been clear as day to me that they’d reflect the data they were trained on. Many researchers recognize this and do their best to accommodate but gone are the days that this sat in academia - people with minimal understanding are frequently being hired to create adequate-enough AI/ML systems for capitalistic corporations. I’m grateful to amazing people like Timnit for sounding the alarm, even if many people are just simply not listening.