Timnit Gebru
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timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru
@timnitgebru.bsky.social
31K followers 840 following 1.1K posts

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Founder: The Distributed AI Research Institute @dairinstitute.bsky.social.

Author: The View from Somewhere, a memoir & manifesto arguing for a technological future that serves our communities (to be published by One Signal / Atria .. more

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Timnit Gebru is an Eritrean Ethiopian-born computer scientist who works in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithmic bias and data mining. She is a co-founder of Black in AI, an advocacy group that has pushed for more Black roles in AI development and research. She is the founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). .. more

Computer science 77%
Mathematics 7%
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timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · Apr 15
🔇🔇🔇Announcing new work from DAIR which is very close to my heart, 3 years in the making.

When #TigrayGenocide, the deadliest genocide of the 21st century thus far, started in November 2020, it was 1 month before I got fired from Google. 🧵

english.elpais.com/internationa...
Ethiopia’s forgotten war is the deadliest of the 21st century, with around 600,000 civilian deaths
Estimates by European institutions and academics say over half a million non-combatants have died during the Tigray conflict as a result of a government blockade that kept out humanitarian aid
english.elpais.com

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

Reposted by Michael E. Mann, Timnit Gebru, Stephen Ryan

junlper.beer
onion person @junlper.beer · 1d
it’s genuinely reassuring to me that this is the most miserable and paranoid person in the entire world

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

nitasha.bsky.social
nitasha tiku @nitasha.bsky.social · 1d
I wanna keep doing this work, in any form (podcast! newsletter! movie? AI literacy class!). Pls msg me on Signal at nitasha.10 if you need someone who’s well-sourced in AI & SV, worked hard to understand the technology + ideas + players, cares about getting it right and informing the public

Reposted by Timnit Gebru, Joanna Bryson, Shannon Vallor , and 15 more

nitasha.bsky.social
nitasha tiku @nitasha.bsky.social · 1d
My story on Elon Musk cutting safeguards at xAI is on the front page of today's @washingtonpost.com. I’m also among 100’s of reporters laid off. I absolutely loved my job my brilliant coworkers & the thrill of reporting @ the center of forces upending the world: AI & Silicon Valley’s political power
cover of The Washington Post on Wednesday Feb 4, 2026. Headline on bottom, right: Musk wanted to hook users; his chatbot got more sexual

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

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Reposted by Timnit Gebru

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

themaybe.org
The Maybe @themaybe.org · 2d
In two weeks, world leaders and tech executives will descend on Delhi for the AI Impact Summit 2026. There, power brokers will paint a pretty picture of the role AI will play in saving the world - from sharing prosperity to fixing climate change.

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

emilymbender.bsky.social
Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 3d
Anyway, well done effective altruists. I'm actually not shocked that you are the ones coming out swinging against (checks notes) the request to treat other people as fully human.

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

emilymbender.bsky.social
Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 3d
I'm not sure if his audience is generally full of EAs or not, but this episode anyway seems to be doing the rounds in that part of the internet and I finally found the crowd who are offended by my boundary setting about acknowledging my humanity.

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Reposted by Timnit Gebru

emilymbender.bsky.social
Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 3d
I replied with "no we need to get into that because one of my rules is that I don't have conversations with people who don't posit my humanity as an axiom of the conversation. So I'm going to invite you to believe for the purpose of this hour that I have just as much internal life as you do."

>>

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

emilymbender.bsky.social
Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 3d
Early on, the host (Bob) says: "I'm kind of curious as to how you could ever know for sure whether they are or not sentient since you can't really know that about any beings other than yourself" and then tries to say something like "But we won't get into that."

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Reposted by Timnit Gebru

emilymbender.bsky.social
Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 3d
A couple of weeks ago, @alexhanna.bsky.social were interviewed for the NonZero podcast. It was overall an unpleasant experience, with the host later admitting (on Twitter) that his goal for the interview was to convince us of his position.

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Reposted by Timnit Gebru

emilymbender.bsky.social
Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 3d
Ever since the Stochastic Parrots paper was published, I've been fielding the question "How do I know that you're not (just) a stochastic parrot?" ... one that I find inherently dehumanizing, as I write about here:

journals-sagepub-com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/doi/10.1177/...

Short 🧵>>

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 3d
A white dude who has nothing to do with linguistics or coptic, explaining "coptic morphology" to a copt and a linguist is like exhibit A in mansplaining lol.

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 4d
I completely forgot about that.

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 4d
You're not the only one who displays misogyny in the way you talk about women who are experts in their field discussing concepts they are experts on. Hilarious that you give other sexists finding the performance "off-putting," as evidence of your claim 😂

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 4d
The white dudes are all over this one, talking about "civility" after calling two expert women discussing concepts outlined in a book they wrote, "smug."

How dare these women display their own expertise.
joelpust.bsky.social Valhalla & Oates @joelpust.bsky.social · 7d
Though I do care about civility in general, my point was about persuading those who disagree. (As I said, my own views are closer to Bender/Hanna than Wright). I am not the only one who found the performance off-putting: read the comments.
The Case Against AI | Robert Wright, Emily Bender, and Alex Hanna
YouTube video by Nonzero
m.youtube.com

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 4d
They're not "effective or persuasive" in the mansplainer "professional circles" like yours who like rando effective altruist accounts because they make them feel "data driven" in their misogyny.

But they are very effective in alerting the rest of us.

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 4d
They're not "effective or persuasive" in the mansplainer "professional circles" like yours who like rando effective altruist accounts because they make them feel "data driven" in their misogyny.

But they are very effective in alerting the rest of us.
mattyglesias.bsky.social Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias.bsky.social · 4d
Are there social or professional circles where these kind of rhetorical strategies (“mansplaining,” etc) are still effective or persuasive?