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Dr Abeba Birhane

@abeba.bsky.social

48K followers 810 following 3.6K posts

Founder & PI @aial.ie, @tcddublin.bsky.social AI accountability, AI audits & evaluation, critical data studies. Cognitive scientist by training. Ethiopian in Ireland. She/her

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · Jun 25

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance

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Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology - Nature

An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Dr Abeba Birhane

Simon McGarr @tupped.bsky.social · 21h

Only by changing the calculus of risk/reward can malign people’s behaviour be moderated.

There must be the credible threat of a reckoning.

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Simon McGarr @tupped.bsky.social · 21h

When that administration’s actions similarly faced no consequences for their actions, Trump II administration appointees knew they could do literally anything and look forward to nothing but rewards for the rest of their life.

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Simon McGarr @tupped.bsky.social · 21h

Because of the extremity of this refusal to ever have executive appointees face consequences for their actions, Trump I appointees could (correctly) assume zero would be done, even up to an armed insurrection to reverse an election result.

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Simon McGarr @tupped.bsky.social · 21h

US lawyer John Yoo wrote a series of memos for the Bush administration in order to create a legal cover for torture.

He suffered no negative consequences. He later was made Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Al Jazeera English @aljazeera.com · 8h

Displaced Palestinians return to the ruins of homes, driven by loss, defiance and the will to rebuild.

Palestinians search Gaza rubble for loved ones in ceasefire, return home

Displaced Palestinians return to the ruins of homes, driven by loss, defiance and the will to rebuild.

bit.ly

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 20h

The Daily show also interviewed "father" of effective altruism William MacAskill & promoted his book.

The billionaires gave him millions to promote his book so a PR person probably got him on the show.

All mainstream media shilling propaganda for the corporations claiming to build machine gods 🙄

The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart @weeklyshowpodcast.bsky.social · 1d

In this week’s new #TheWeeklyShow episode, Jon & Geoffrey Hinton discuss ⬇️:

>> AI 101
>> AI Threats & Regulation
>> Ping, Ping, Ping
>> Always Angry Trump & Pardons

NEW YouTube video out now.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrK3...

AI: What Could Go Wrong? with Geoffrey Hinton | The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart

YouTube video by The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart

www.youtube.com

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Alex Ip 葉清霖 @alexip718.com · 21h

I can't stress enough that if this is what Border Patrol does to a middle-aged Midwestern white woman producer on camera, imagine what they are doing to people who are *not* middle-aged Midwestern white women off-camera

Heartland Signal @heartlandsignal.bsky.social · 22h

BREAKING: Masked Border Patrol agents aggressively arrested WGN video producer Debbie Brockman in Lincoln Square Friday morning, supposedly for "obstructing justice." (Video via Josh Thomas on Facebook)

Follow @heartlandsignal for more.

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Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.bsky.social · 17h

aaand we are officially in the hide-your-neighbors stage

Sophie Sherry @sophiesherry.bsky.social · 20h

During a military-style raid on a building in Chicago’s South Shore, one resident heard a knock on his door.   It wasn’t the feds — it was a mom and her 7-year-old daughter, pleading for help.

He let them hide in his unit for the next 3 days.

chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

Neighbor shielded 7-year-old during South Shore federal raid: ‘I didn’t want them to take her’

During the Sept. 30 raid one tenant protected a terrified girl and her mom. Remnants at the complex, including a detailed map of all the units, offer clues to what authorities may have known before th...

chicago.suntimes.com

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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 13h

Is it cancel culture when they threaten to kill you?

www.nj.com/news/2025/10...

Sold-out Ta-Nehisi Coates speaker appearance in N.J. canceled over security reasons

Organizers canceled a sold-out Ta-Nehisi Coates event in Montclair citing undisclosed security concerns.

www.nj.com

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 11h

meh 😏

www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

Venezuelan opposition leader dedicates Nobel Prize to Trump for ‘decisive support’

“I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause,” she wrote in a post on X.

www.politico.com

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Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 13h

I don’t know who needs to hear this but the CDC is being eviscerated right now. America is not going to have any kind of outbreak response capacity after tonight. Americans’ health data is no longer secure. Say goodbye to federal public health in any capacity. It’s a disaster. We won’t recover.

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Sheryl Gay Stolberg @sherylnyt.bsky.social · 14h

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

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tanterei.bsky.social @tanterei.bsky.social · 17h

It's always a revolving door.
People from a prominent bank are currently advising the UK govt. on their "quantum strategy" and applying for millions in project funds in the same breath.

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Al Jazeera English @aljazeera.com · 17h

The Gaza Government Media Office calls for 'comprehensive reconstruction' after Israel levelled most of the territory.

Gaza local authorities demand independent genocide probe as truce starts

The Gaza Government Media Office calls for 'comprehensive reconstruction' after Israel levelled most of the territory.

bit.ly

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 1d

Chidi from The Good Place meme: “Okay but that’s worse. You do see how that’s worse, right?”

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 18h

as a cognitive scientist, I confirm

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 1d

as a cognitive scientist, I can confirm we don't know how humans think

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Missing The Point @missingthept.bsky.social · 22h

The person who leaks the Epstein files will never have to buy a drink again in their life.

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 18h

በፖስታ እልክልሻለሁ

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 1d

friday vibes

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Alex Hanna-ween @alexhanna.bsky.social · 1d

The state leader to tech bro pipeline. Eric Adams is well on his way too.

Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 1d

from law making to law capitulating

Sunak goes from occupying the highest office in the UK government to advising the wealthiest and most powerful industry

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Rishi Sunak takes advisory roles with Microsoft and AI firm Anthropic

The former prime minister has been told not to lobby the UK government by the appointments watchdog.

www.bbc.com

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 1d

from law making to law capitulating

Sunak goes from occupying the highest office in the UK government to advising the wealthiest and most powerful industry

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Rishi Sunak takes advisory roles with Microsoft and AI firm Anthropic

The former prime minister has been told not to lobby the UK government by the appointments watchdog.

www.bbc.com

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The Daily Show @thedailyshow.com · 1d

The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 1d

important on LLMs for academics:

1️⃣ LLMs are usefully seen as lossy content-addressable systems

2️⃣ we can't automatically detect plagiarism

3️⃣ LLMs automate plagiarism & paper mills

4️⃣ we must protect literature from pollution

5️⃣ LLM use is a CoI

6️⃣ prompts do not cause output in authorial sense

5 Ghostwriter in the Machine
A unique selling point of these systems is conversing and writing in a human-like way. This is imminently understandable, although wrong-headed, when one realises these are systems that
essentially function as lossy2
content-addressable memory: when
input is given, the output generated by the model is text that
stochastically matches the input text. The reason text at the output looks novel is because by design the AI product performs
an automated version of what is known as mosaic or patchwork
plagiarism (Baždarić, 2013) — due to the nature of input masking and next token prediction, the output essentially uses similar words in similar orders to what it has been exposed to. This
makes the automated flagging of plagiarism unlikely, which is
also true when students or colleagues perform this type of copypaste and then thesaurus trick, and true when so-called AI plagiarism detectors falsely claim to detect AI-produced text (Edwards, 2023a). This aspect of LLM-based AI products can be
seen as an automation of plagiarism and especially of the research paper mill (Guest, 2025; Guest, Suarez, et al., 2025; van
Rooij, 2022): the “churn[ing] out [of] fake or poor-quality journal papers” (Sanderson, 2024; Committee on Publication Ethics,

Either way, even if
the courts decide in the favour of companies, we should not allow
these companies with vested interests to write our papers (Fisher
et al., 2025), or to filter what we include in our papers. Because
it is not the case that we only operate based on legal precedents,
but also on our own ethical values and scientific integrity codes
(ALLEA, 2023; KNAW et al., 2018), and we have a direct duty to
protect, as with previous crises and in general, the literature from
pollution. In other words, the same issues as in previous sections
play out here, where essentially now every paper produced using
chatbot output must declare a conflict of interest, since the output text can be biased in subtle or direct ways by the company
who owns the bot (see Table 2).
Seen in the right light — AI products understood as contentaddressable systems — we see that framing the user, the academic
in this case, as the creator of the bot’s output is misplaced. The
input does not cause the output in an authorial sense, much like
input to a library search engine does not cause relevant articles
and books to be written (Guest, 2025). The respective authors
wrote those, not the search query!

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Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 1d

Do they have a prize for blowing up boats in the Caribbean and then bragging that people who made their livelihood fishing there for generations are now afraid to go out on the water?

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Hend Amry @libyaliberty.bsky.social · 1d

Going home. Alhamdulilah.
Tears of relief after so many years of horror.
Alhamdullilah.

Thousands of Palestinian refugees crowd a seaside road as they slowly start walking back to Gaza towns.

Two photos: Palestinians in crowds walk through rubble towards home, and IOF tanks kick up dust as they retreat across a scarred Gaza landscape

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