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.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.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.