Who's Who of AI

Abeba Birhane

Assistant Professor of AI, founder of the AI Accountability Lab

722 trust ethicist @abeba.blacksky.app · 52,693 followers
AI research AI business Compute & infrastructure Evaluation & benchmarks
Why they matter

Assistant Professor of AI, founder of the AI Accountability Lab with public evidence across AI research, AI business, Compute & infrastructure.

AI signals
11
past 30d
Sources
11
distinct domains
Discussions
20
past 30d
Latest signal
7d ago
View every signal from Abeba Birhane →
Founder & PI @aial.ie. Assistant Professor of AI, School of Computer Science & Statistics, @tcddublin.bsky.social AI accountability, AI audits & evaluation, critical data studies. Cognitive scientist by training. Ethiopian in Ireland. She/her
What they're sharing

Articles & links

↻ Abeba Birhane reposted
@jaredlholt.bsky.social

WIRED got a copy of a New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report that has a curious term for opposition to AI development and data centers: "anti-tech violent extremist activity." Great reporting here on how law enforcement is tracking big tech opponents www.wire…

US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows | WIRED wired.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Wired reviewed over 1,000 pages of unpublished DHS, FBI, and fusion-center reports coalescing around a new label called 'anti-tech extremism.'
  • A Delaware Valley fusion-center bulletin flagged AI data centers as extremist targets while conceding it had no specific plots or suspects.
  • The term 'anti-technology violent extremism' does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI extremism documents, per Wired's review.
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↻ Abeba Birhane reposted
Karla Ortiz @kortizart.bsky.social

“An astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and the “largest theft of labor in human history” is what a Microsoft executive privately said about GenAi as shown in newly unsealed court filings. And these court filings get worse. These execs knew all along the immense th…

‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft 404media.co
AI Weekly's analysis →
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AI did not and cannot do such a thing! it is literally in the next line (Scientists trained AI on libraries of DNA and then asked the model to create recipes for viral genomes) but hype and clickbait over accurate reporting i guess www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/s...

nytimes.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 139 ↻ 44 ↩ 10 · 7 from the directory shared this · 52d ago
↻ Abeba Birhane reposted
Woodrow Hartzog @hartzog.bsky.social

UC Berkeley Law's new AI policy seems close to this. "This policy...[forbids the use of AI] to conceptualize, outline, draft, revise, and edit their work...for credit. It also forbids using AI to translate work [and] in any exam situation." www.law.berkeley.edu/academics/re...

Artificial Intelligence Policy law.berkeley.edu
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • UC Berkeley Law will bar AI from conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit starting Summer 2026.
  • AI is completely prohibited for any purpose in any exam situation; students also cannot upload assignments, readings, slides, or class recordings into generative AI systems.
  • The one research carve-out lets students use AI only to identify sources such as cases, statutes, or secondary sources.
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"In a leaked document, the Irish Presidency proposes to EU Member States that the interest of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and SpaceX to make profits should take precedence over the fundamental right to data protection" noyb.eu/en/ai-eu-mem...

AI: EU Member States plan “digital expropriation” of Europeans in the interest of AI companies noyb.eu
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Ireland's EU Presidency circulated Article 88bis (previously 88c), which would let AI companies process personal data 'in the context of AI' without normal GDPR restrictions.
  • noyb founder Max Schrems calls the move 'digital expropriation' and names OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and SpaceX as the primary beneficiaries.
  • A noyb survey found only 7% of users want Meta training AI on their data, though 75% said they had heard of the plans.
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 459 ↻ 290 ↩ 18 · 4 from the directory shared this · 7d ago

"But there is no honour for the humanities in regaining their standing through the attention of AI companies, if they engage only on the technology industry’s terms. In that case, they will have become important in exactly the wrong way." www.ft.com/content/bdb3...

ft.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 479 ↻ 156 ↩ 5 · 6 from the directory shared this · 50d ago

what does @tonychemero.bsky.social's new book 'Intertwined Creatures' have to offer to the “AI consciousness” debate? here is my take on it www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Can AI ever be conscious? The question stems from a misconception nature.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • A Nature review of Anthony Chemero's Intertwined Creatures argues the AI-consciousness question misreads what human minds actually are.
  • Chemero, a philosopher and cognitive scientist, casts thinking as bodily, environmental and social rather than a hidden inner computation.
  • Large language models, the review says, lack bodies to maintain and cannot care, undercutting many AI-consciousness arguments.
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 93 ↻ 47 ↩ 7 · 3 from the directory shared this · 35d ago
↻ Abeba Birhane reposted
Jake Laperruque @jakelaperruque.bsky.social

If AI systems are trained to tell users what they want to hear, what happens when those users are cops and prosecutors? My latest @techpolicypress.bsky.social piece begins a three part series on Perils of AI in Policing, starting with risk of AI sycophancy contaminating law en…

Will AI Sycophancy Contaminate Law Enforcement? techpolicy.press
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • CDT's Jake Laperruque argues AI sycophancy, the tendency to flatter users, could distort police reports, case summaries, and prosecutorial decisions.
  • The piece names Axon's automated report tool, Truleo's virtual detective, and Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Legal as high-stakes deployments to scrutinize.
  • Axon's Draft One is described as designed to avoid tracking which parts of automated police reports are edited by officers.
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Their own posts

Recent commentary

“our ai broke out and hacked some organisations” = "we failed to set up appropriate safeguards, failed to continuously monitor our experiments, and ignored a basic principle of reinforcement learning: if hacking gets rewarded, the system learns to hack"

View on Bluesky · ♥ 697 ↻ 206 ↩ 13 · 9d ago

there is no such thing as "responsible use of generative ai" in research

View on Bluesky · ♥ 580 ↻ 159 ↩ 3 · 97d ago

for every skeet i post here showing ai systems catastrophically failing to do what they are supposed to do, i have dudes replying with “but humans are also bad at x" just don't. it's ignorant and unhelpful

View on Bluesky · ♥ 464 ↻ 75 ↩ 14 · 102d ago

llms don't and can't love, hate, feel, care, think, imagine, dream, hope, fear, believe, reflect, aspire, wonder, empathize,... fix your your anthropomorphising language

View on Bluesky · ♥ 323 ↻ 106 ↩ 4 · 108d ago

i dunno but using a machine that always regresses to the mean (llms) to simulate “diverse populations that are not readily accessible” seems the oppose of good science to me… no matter how popular it has become in behavioural sciences

View on Bluesky · ♥ 343 ↻ 78 ↩ 7 · 99d ago

in a phone conversation with family from back home who tells me something suspicious me: where did that information come from? family: "i googled it on chatgpt" i give up

View on Bluesky · ♥ 418 ↻ 35 ↩ 7 · 42d ago

i’m betting Jacob Coxon, the guy who quit anthropic because he thinks advanced AI will lead to human extinction, will raise millions and start his own “alignment” startup to save us all

View on Bluesky · ♥ 227 ↻ 33 ↩ 13 · 10d ago

i'm tired of seeing “escalating ai capabilities” reported as if it is a fact. let's be clear this claim does not rest on transparent, well-defined, independently validated metrics, but is inferred from model behaviours elicited by humans and measured through opaque, poorly designed evaluations

View on Bluesky · ♥ 135 ↻ 50 ↩ 2 · 8d ago

i cannot emphasise it enough: rid yourself of the idea that the purpose of your research is to develop “solutions” to the clusterfuck the ai industry has thrown at us. i certainly am not interested in that or in making existing ai systems “better” 1/

View on Bluesky · ♥ 136 ↻ 26 ↩ 2 · 105d ago

the ai industry hijacked the term “safety” and ran it into the ground, stripping it of all meaning

View on Bluesky · ♥ 118 ↻ 28 ↩ 6 · 101d ago
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