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Timneet Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute, or DARE. She's also the former co-lead of the ethical AI research team at Google before being fired in 2020. In this conversation, we talk about what these AI tools might mean. We also talk about Timneet herself and her own history because I did want to know a bit more about how she was ultimately fired by Google.

Paris Marx is joined by Timnit Gebru to discuss the misleading framings of artificial intelligence, her experience of getting fired by Google in a very public way, and why we need to avoid getting distracted by all the hype around ChatGPT and AI image tools.

Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute and former co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google. You can follow her on Twitter at @timnitGebru.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.

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Timnit wrote about the exploited labor behind AI tools and how effective altruism is pushing a harmful idea of AI ethics.
Karen Hao broke down the details of the paper that got Timnit fired from Google.
Emily Tucker wrote an article called “Artifice and Intelligence.”
In 2016, ProPublica published an article about technology being used to “predict” future criminals that was biased against black people.
In 2015, Google Photos classified black women as “gorillas.” In 2018, it still hadn’t really been fixed.
Artists have been protesting AI-generated images that train themselves on their work and threaten their livelihoods.
OpenAI used Kenyan workers paid less than $2 an hour to try to make ChatGPT less toxic.
Zachary Loeb described ELIZA in his article about Joseph Weizenbaum’s work and legacy.