Timnit Gebru

Please spread the world and encourage people who you think may be interested, to apply.

Applications for JamCoders, a 1 month free algorithms & programming camp for Jamaican high schoolers, are now open.

Head over to jamcoders.org.jm#apply. No programming experience required for students.

We're looking for students & teaching assistants.

Deadline January 31.

Stalker Already Using OpenAI's Sora 2 to Harass Victim A journalist claims that her stalker used Sora 2, the latest video app from OpenAI, to churn out videos of her.

“…that Sora is being used for stalking and harassment will likely not be an edge case, because deepfaking yourself and others into videos is one of its core selling points.”

Far from an edge case, it’s the primary use case.

Bernie's people were quote tweeting Dario's article talking about his "fear" of what Anthropic's "AGI" was gonna do while he was raising billions.

Bernie, why not talk about the millions of books they're pirating or the workers they're exploiting rather than do free propaganda for them?

Bernie's staff would be well to pay attention to actual research on this topic, and the historical record on automation, rather than buying into the tech industry's hype in their marketing and paper-shaped objects.

Episode 25: An LLM Says LLMs Can Do Your Job, January 22 2024 - Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 Is ChatGPT really going to take your job? Emily and Alex unpack two hype-tastic papers that make implausible claims about the number of workforce tasks LLMs might make cheaper, faster or easier. And w...

So not only did they use a synthetic text extruding machine to do the analysis, it also suggested that these jobs can actually be automated.

My guess is that they did an "analysis" like the "GPTs are GPTs" paper. We discussed this when it came out.

www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/epis...

Exclusive: AI could erase 100 million U.S. jobs, Senate Dem report finds A ChatGPT-based analysis from Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee found that AI could wipe out swaths of both white- and blue-collar jobs

With labor friends like these, who needs enemies?

"A ChatGPT-based analysis from Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee found that AI could wipe out swaths of both white- and blue-collar jobs."

www.axios.com/2025/10/06/a...

After Columbia canceled my course on race and media, and Washington Poat fired me for speaking about race and violence,

I’m teaching about race and media anyway!

@resistanceschool.bsky.social fall session on Race, Media and International Affairs starts tonight!

600+ signups.

We move!! ✊🏾

Cover page of Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

Table 1 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

Table 2 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

New preprint 🌟 Psychology is core to cognitive science, and so it is vital we preserve it from harmful frames. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I use our psych and computer science expertise to analyse and craft:

Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🧵 1/

Closure for Families of the Missing Behind every name is a family torn apart, a void where a loved one should be.

In this possible futures entry, @meron.bsky.social imagines a future where the families of the disappeared find closure.
www.dair-institute.org/blog/eritrea...

Today is the 12th anniversary of 369 Eritrean refugees who drowned in Lampedusa exactly 12 years ago. As our researcher refugee advocate Meron Estefanos wrote, one of them was 22 years old and was giving birth as she was drowning. Her body was later found with an umbilical cord attached to her baby.

Or at best, collaborating with organizations that are actively supporting this government and then telling us that they didn't know what they were supporting.

Ignorance isn't an excuse for aiding and abetting in genociding and in butchering people who are already silenced.

People escaping the most brutal dictatorship in the world were met with the European's basically official policy of killing refugees .

This is why I can't stand so-called leftist US organizations that claim to stand against the genocide of Palestinians while working with the Eritrean government.

Today is the 12th anniversary of 369 Eritrean refugees who drowned in Lampedusa (Italy) exactly 12 years ago. As @meron.bsky.social wrote, one of them was 22 years old and was giving birth as she was drowning. Her body was later found with an umbilical cord attached to her baby.

It's a picture of a poem dedicated to the youngest coffin which was marked as number 92. The poem is called RIP angel, what did your mom call you as I can't stand calling you number 92. The poem was written by Selam Kidane

Remembering the 369 refugees who drowned in Lampedusa exactly 12 years ago today. I can never forget the 22 years old Yohanna who gave birth as she was drowning, her body was later found with an ombilical cord attached to her baby. #NeverForgotten #ForeverInOurHearts #PeopleNotNumbers #Lampedusa

As a birthday bonus, here’s one more audiogram for Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 Ep 63

www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/epis...

w/ @alexhanna.bsky.social
production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman

If the current 'AI' hype seems ideologically motivated to you, it's because there's a whole bundle of ideologies operating in the background. Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social and Émile Torres @xriskology.bsky.social call it the 'TESCREAL bundle'. You can read their fundamental paper here:

More than 70 civilians killed in attack on mosque in Darfur’s el-Fasher UN report says ethnic violence has risen and civilians are bearing brunt as war continues between Sudan’s army and RSF.

70+ worshippers at the Al-Safiya Mosque in El Fasher were killed in an RSF drone strike today, Friday, when Jumah services means mosques are full.

The UAE, which backs the RSF despite it being accused of genocide, continues to face no scrutiny from its western security partners, including the US.

The Continent 27 SEPTEMBER 2025 | ISSUE 215 15 INVESTIGATION The Djiboutian massacre Ethiopia won’t acknowledge Djibouti drones killed eight people on the other side of its border with Ethiopia. Djibouti claimed they were terrorists. Ethiopia said nothing. This investigation found that some of the dead were Ethiopians, revealing another episode in Addis’s tendency to let its neighbours kill its citizens with impunity. Crossing the line: Djibouti’s bombs landed inside Ethiopia, killing civilians – not armed fighters. zecharias zelalem On 30 January this year, a drone manned from Djibouti dropped a bomb on a funeral gathering in Siyaru, a remote, semi-arid village near the Ethiopia Djibouti border. As rescuers rushed in, a second bomb dropped. And then a third. At least eight people were killed, including three children. Several others were injured. Given the village’s remoteness, the incident might have gone unreported if graphic images of the dead hadn’t spread across Ethiopian social media. A statement from the Djibouti’s defence ministry said the drone struck rebel fighters from the Front for the

Restoration of Unity and Democracy (Frud), a Djiboutian political party with a military wing. It has been fighting for Afar interests in Djibouti since the 1990s. The Afar are a community split by the colonial border separating Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Eritrea. “Eight terrorists were neutralised on site,” said a Djibouti military statement. “Unfortunately, collateral damage among Djiboutian civilians in the area has been documented.” International media, including Voice of America, Agence France Presse, and Radio France Internationale reported this version of events. Now, new findings from an open In recovery: Mariam Mohammed Abdullah was injured in the drone strike. source investigation by The Continent reveal a different reality. The bombs landed inside Ethiopia, not in Djibouti, and civilians – not armed fighters – were killed. That distinction matters. It shows Ethiopia is once again tolerating a foreign military targeting its own citizens, as it did with Eritrea during the Tigray conflict. A transparent lie Even before the ink could dry on the Djiboutian military’s statement, The Addis Standard and human rights groups in Djibouti were emphatic that the strike had actually occurred inside Ethiopia’s Afar region. But Alexis Mohamed, an adviser to Djiboutian President Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, rubbished these reports in now-deleted social media posts. The Continent got to work to figure out what really happened. Over the course of eight months, we collected eyewitness testimonies, interviewed human rights activists in Ethiopia and Djibouti, and examined images and footage from the strike. Our findings align with those of Djiboutian activists, who pinpointed Siyaru in Ethiopia’s Afar region as the site of the strike. The ammunition residue found on the night of the strike confirms the bomb was manufactured by Roketsan, a state run weapons manufacturer in Türkiye. Former US army explosives expert Trevor Ball identified t…

THREAD: this investigation took up over half my year, but it's here in @thecontinent.org:
A Djiboutian drone strike in January was depicted as a army operation targeting rebels. It was actually a massacre of civilians. The bloodshed & coverup implicating Ethiopia, Djibouti, France & Turkiye.
#OSINT

An image of Kirby eating half a rectangle labeled "Frame F". Next to Kirby is a pink box labeled: Kirby. K is happening. That's why they're saying F. In that box is the text: OTHER THINGS ARE POSSIBLE.

all of Possible Futures is basically

YouTube video by Merriam-Webster LLM

Yall please go watch @merriam-webster.com’s new AI ad😅

youtu.be/RvQnl3O0D3c?...

Join the Center for Innovation, Law, and Society (CILS) for a talk with Dr. @timnitgebru.bsky.social about the history of the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) movement and its link to the 20th-century eugenics movement.

This in-person event will also be livestreamed: bit.ly/42kxaQV

#AGI #AI

Mind the gap: Building inclusive AI for African languages Poor quality and domain bias in training data hinders language tool development. That's why language diversity must be a priority, says Kathleen Siminyu from the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Re...

Our own Kathleen Siminyu writes: "most parallel data [...] was from the religious domain, either translations of the Bible or other religious texts [...] done by religious organizations whose primary aim was evangelization, both in pre-colonial & post-colonial times."
akademie.dw.com/en/mind-the-...

With both crypto and AI, there are humans involved at every level of the stack. Narratives of automation make it seem like the process is merely mechanical, but if there are humans involved, there are points for regulatory intervention (and in this case, humans who may need legal protections)

How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart Contracted AI raters describe grueling deadlines, poor pay and opacity around work to make chatbots intelligent

"“AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,” said @adiod.bsky.social , a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute based in Bremen, Germany. “These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.”

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

How Silicon Valley is using religious language to talk about AI As the rapid, unregulated development of artificial intelligence continues, the language people in Silicon Valley use to describe it is becoming increasingly religious.

“These are really big, scary problems that are complex & challenging to address — it’s so easy to gravitate towards fantastical thinking & wanting a one-size-fits-all global solution."
— @dylnbkr.bsky.social, lead research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute

apnews.com/article/arti...

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots | Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

On the supply and risk side mentioned in order Dr.
@emilymbender.bsky.social, Dr. @timnitgebru.bsky.social, Dr. Angelina McMillan-Major & Dr. @mmitchell.bsky.social's paper "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots", that is a must read.

The New Artificial Intelligentsia | Los Angeles Review of Books In the fifth essay of the Legacies of Eugenics series, Ruha Benjamin explores how AI evangelists wrap their self-interest in a cloak of humanistic concern.

I've just finished Section 2 "Marketing, Hype, and Harm" which is chockablock full of solid references, like @timnitgebru.bsky.social and @xriskology.bsky.social TESCREAL framework as well as this essay (link) by @ruha9.bsky.social.

Time to pause for the afternoon to get parents from the airport.

Affirmations from today~

Solidarity: Together, we are building the world our ancestors dreamed and our children deserve.