Abeba Birhane

Assistant Professor of AI, founder of the AI Accountability Lab

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
15
past 30d
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past 30d
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1d ago
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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  • Wired reviewed over 1,000 pages of unpublished DHS, FBI, and fusion-center reports coalescing around a new label called 'anti-tech extremism.'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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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 · 31d 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.
Read full analysis →
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"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 · 29d 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.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 93 ↻ 47 ↩ 7 · 3 from the directory shared this · 14d 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.
Read full analysis →
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Abeba Birhane reposted
Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app

I think it’s cool how “this toaster might electrocute you” or “these brakes don’t always work” is acceptable in consumer products because it’s software.

Claude can help manage your email inbox, but there are some risks involved - Engadget engadget.com
AI Weekly's analysis
  • Claude can now send, reply to and forward Gmail messages on a user's behalf without asking for approval on every action.
  • Attackers can embed invisible white-on-white or zero-font-size text in emails to make Claude leak verification codes or monitor an inbox.
  • Simon Willison, who popularized the term 'prompt injection,' says no one knows how to reliably stop the attack yet.
Read full analysis →
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Recent commentary

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

View on Bluesky · ♥ 580 ↻ 159 ↩ 3 · 77d 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 · 81d 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 · 87d 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 · 78d 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 · 22d 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 · 84d 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 · 80d 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 · 92d 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 · 75d 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 · 73d ago

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