AI industry is influencing the world. Mozilla adviser Abeba Birhane is challenging its core values
“Scaling up” is a catchphrase in the artificial intelligence industry as tech companies rush to improve their AI systems with ever-bigger sets of internet data
“Scaling up" is a catchphrase in the artificial intelligence industry as tech companies rush to improve their AI systems with ever-bigger sets of internet data.
It's also a red flag for Mozilla's Abeba Birhane, an AI expert who for years has challenged the values and practices of her field and the influence it's having on the world.
Her latest research finds that scaling up on online data used to train popular AI image-generator tools is disproportionately resulting in racist outputs, especially against Black men.
Birhane is a senior adviser in AI accountability at the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit parent organization of the free software company that runs the Firefox web browser. Raised in Ethiopia and living in Ireland, she's also an adjunct assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin.
Her interview with The Associated Press has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How did you get started in the AI field?
A: I’m a cognitive scientist by training. Cog sci doesn’t have its own department wherever you are studying it. So where I studied, it was under computer science. I was placed in a lab full of machine learners. They were doing so much amazing stuff and nobody was paying attention to the data. I found that very amusing and also very interesting because I thought data was one of the most important components to the success of your model. But I found it weird that people don’t pay that much attention or time asking, ‘What’s in my dataset?’ That’s how I got interested in this space. And then eventually, I started doing audits of large scale datasets.
Q:
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