Abeba Birhane

Assistant Professor of AI, founder of the AI Accountability Lab

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

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  • Wired reviewed over 1,000 pages of unpublished DHS, FBI, and fusion-center reports coalescing around a new label called 'anti-tech extremism.'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.
Read full analysis →
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one of the most comprehensive surveys on children’s use of AI--conducted March 18-26, 2026, among 9-17yr olds in the US (N = 1,204)--has been released www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/defaul... highlighting key findings 🧵 "Nearly 9 in 10 kids age 9 to 17 (86%) use/interact with AI"

commonsensemedia.org
View on Bluesky · ♥ 172 ↻ 87 ↩ 9 · 3 from the directory shared this · 26d ago

Recent commentary

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

View on Bluesky · ♥ 580 ↻ 159 ↩ 3 · 16d 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 · 20d 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 · 26d 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 · 17d 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 · 23d 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 · 19d ago

safety evaluation research the past year or two: "we use llms to ideate & define “harm”, then use llms to generate prompts about it, which we then feed to llms to generate responses, we then use an llm-as-a-judge to classify the responses, we then use an llm to evaluate the accuracy…"

View on Bluesky · ♥ 126 ↻ 25 ↩ 3 · 31d ago

reading AI eval papers using llm-as-a-judge is alarming for many reasons; many “scientific claims” rely on evals executed on models that are now deprecated. how are we supposed to treat “findings” that are inherently not reproducible? i despair. llms are accelerating the decay of scientific rigor

View on Bluesky · ♥ 95 ↻ 33 ↩ 5 · 14d ago

Charlton McIlwain makes such a poignant point at #FAccT2026: what has the decades of work that has measured, documented, & evaluated the failure and bias of AI systems done? we have known the negative impact for decades yet very little has changed

View on Bluesky · ♥ 90 ↻ 33 ↩ 3 · 12d ago

what’s joy look like in this deranged ‘AI or die world’ you ask: well, today for me, it is computer science and statistics students quoting Ruha Benjamin and bell hooks in their research papers

View on Bluesky · ♥ 93 ↻ 21 ↩ 3 · 2d ago

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