Archived: Timnit Gebru Is Calling Attention to the Pitfalls of AI

As a leading researcher on the ethics of artificial intelligence, Timnit Gebru has long believed that machine-learning algorithms could one day power much of our lives. What she didn’t predict was just how quickly this would happen. “I didn’t imagine people would be like, ‘Let’s replace lawyers with a chatbot,’ or ‘Let’s sell AI generated art that looks exactly like someone else’s,’” she says over video from her home in California’s Bay Area. “I didn’t anticipate using chatbots in search engines, which is a bonkers idea that everyone is now racing to do.”

Dr. Gebru, 39, is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), a nonprofit she launched in 2021 with backing from the MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and others. Much of her work involves highlighting the ways AI programs can reinforce existing prejudices. “We talk about algorithms, but we don’t talk about who’s constructing the data set or who’s in the data set,” she says. Because machine-learning systems adopt patterns of language and images scraped from the internet, they are often riddled with the internet’s all-too-human flaws: “If the input data is biased, then the output can amplify such biases.”