Timnit Gebru says harmful AI systems need to be stopped

By Timnit Gebru

The field of artificial intelligence (ai) cycles through what are called AI summers, epochs where every other news headline seems to be about AI and there is ample funding for the field, and AI winters, which come from the disappointment of undelivered overpromises during the summers. We are currently in perhaps the most intense AI summer ever, where just the mere mention of “AI” gets startups 15-50% more funds in investment.

But just like past summers, even the current hype cycle is an “AI summer” only for those profiting from building these systems or the researchers who get funding to work on the dominant paradigm of the day. For many people in the AI pipeline—from the exploited workers supplying and labelling data that power these systems and the content moderators who filter out toxic content, to the marginalised groups who live in apartheid states being overpoliced because of ai—it is a nightmare that shows no signs of abating.