Dr 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
- i finally started working out (after threatening to do it for past 10 yrs) so now I'm gonna be one of those people who choses hotels based on gym facilities when i travel
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneDamn you’re telling me the technology that was very obviously intended for unregulated speculation and criminal enterprises was used to do awful things
- another week before the application portal closes (and no extension, unfortunately) so please apply and/or help circulate this ad
- I’m looking for my right-hand person to come help me run the @aial.ie - Job Title: Lab Coordinator, AI Accountability Lab (0.8 FTE) - Pay Scale: (€58,999 - €69,325 per annum pro-rata) - Closing Date: 11-Feb-2026 12:00 Apply here: my.corehr.com/pls/trrecrui... Main Responsibilities👇🏾
- 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneÉ isso. Pra chegar a bilionário tem que ser pilantra
- I think because capitalism is so set up to reward crooks and corrupts, it's unlikely for those not corrupt to hoard billions
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneAccording to Reporters Without Borders, in 2025, Ireland was ranked 7th in the world for freedom of the press. The United States was ranked 57th. So we’ll be taking no complaints about censorship from US politicians, thanks. #SpeirGorm rsf.org/en
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneCheck out the essay versions of these conversations from @ainowinstitute.bsky.social!
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneAnd this is just the beginning! We’ll drop more interviews with @timnitgebru.bsky.social, @meredithmeredith.bsky.social, @abeba.bsky.social, @audreyt.org, and more next week.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba Birhane4. @naomiaklein.bsky.social debunks “AI for Climate” - laying bare the environmentally disastrous race to scale compute, and how governments, tech companies, and warmongers are conspiring to accelerate the climate clock. www.themaybe.org/reframing-im...
- Reposted by Dr Abeba Birhane3. @karenhao.bsky.social unpacks the idea of “Data Rich” countries - how Global Majority countries are compelled to offer up their people, resources, and data to gain access to the AI industry - and what a vision for actually empowering AI models could look like around the world.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba Birhane2. @joan1k.bsky.social takes us behind the curtain of data work in an interrogation of “Human Capital” - how the people who power AI through data labeling, content moderation, and algorithm training are invisibilized by execs that rely on their labor for “magic” AI. www.themaybe.org/reframing-im...
- Reposted by Dr Abeba Birhane1. Usha Ramanathan breaks down the idea of “AI for Development,” specifically how the AI craze impacts our digital public infrastructures. www.themaybe.org/reframing-im...
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneWe’ve interviewed twelve leading advocates, builders, and thinkers from around the world who are bringing substance, analysis, and meaningful action back to these ideas.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneWe’re thrilled to launch our Reframing Impact: AI Summit 2026 series today! In partnership with @ainowinstitute.bsky.social and Aapti Institute, we set out to interrogate the narratives shaping AI discourse, and the truth about its real impact.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneThey’ll throw around ideas of tech sovereignty, AI for good, democratization, and more. But what do these buzzwords really mean? What are the geopolitical realities of AI, and how is it impacting people around the world today? How can we take back the words that have been co-opted for far too long?
- 🔥🔥🔥 what a wonderful company to be with
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneEvery Black woman everywhere, I hope that, if nothing else, tonight you know in your heart of hearts that you are not crazy.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneWhy not add switches to turn them on instead, if they absolutely have to be in there?
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneDefinitely seems like they destroyed the country on purpose.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneIn between all the fascism, it's also a MASSIVE crime wave.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneJust think about the amazing Epstein scoops the new CBS Evening News contributors will have just by interviewing each other.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba Birhaneand all of the arguments we made 5 yrs ago in this paper about why the idea of robot rights relies on faulty assumptions about the nature of human cognition and intelligence still hold Robot Rights?: Let's Talk about Human Welfare Instead dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...
- time to repost this
- we've written about this in the past firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneI genuinely have no idea how to convey this to the American people, but I think the biggest impediment to any kind of immigration reform is that people are convinced that "legal" and "illegal" are immutable, intrinsic categories instead of a rapidly-shifting arbitrary constellation of regulations.
- a. neural. network. is. not. a. dog
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneThe Epstein case reflects systemic issues within the American elite. Despite clear evidence, the perpetrators will probably never be charged. They engage in exploitative practices without consequence.The American oligarchy has amassed its wealth through parasitism
- and it's okay to have the desire to personify robots. just don't mistake your projection and desire for inherent qualities of a machine
- This appears to be the underlying basis for most advocacy of #robotrights / personification of chatbots etc. Calling this relationalism just masks the fact that human desires / perceptions produce the effects: it is the wish-fulfilling transfer of human (or simply, living) qualities to machines.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneTroublemaker is my middle name.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneDo you remember when people were saying "I think my phone is listening to me, i'm getting ads for stuff I spoke about" and people said "They arent listening to you, they're just this good at predicting your interests"? Well, it happens they were doing exactly that. www.cbsnews.com/news/google-...
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneBillie Eilish: "No one is illegal on stolen land"
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneEpstein’s economic power among academics was made possible by a capitalist system that makes higher education dependent on the charity economy rather than a public good supported by taxing the rich
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneDr Abeba Birhane runs the coolest AI research I know: critical analysis of its biases &c including its effects on society. Please help her out if you know how to mitigate esp. # 2 below.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneNews report saying that many Palestinians lost their lives during this latest massacre. They didn’t lose them. They were killed. By Israel.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneWhat's most amazing about this is the fact that the WSJ needed a “study” to figure it out.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneMost of Epstein’s victims were either too frightened to come forward, or silenced through legal threats. Oh, and here’s a senior British politician giving Epstein tips on how to silence them
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneTakeaway: Any time the Trump administration says "AI" or anything about software or data, what you should hear is "repression as a service" This has 2 parts: 1. AI as an excuse to consolidate data 2. AI to execute orders that humans would refuse
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneAs sure as walking off with hard drives is illegal, what DOGE did with Palantir is illegal. The laws they violated have boring names like the Antideficiency Act, the Privacy Act, and Federal Acquisition Regulation. These are laws the government used to enforce *on itself*. Not anymore.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneA few days later, Wired reported that DOGE was building exactly this: cross-government data connections with Palantir — the literal company with that name, not just the metaphor.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneThis leaked video of a presentation by DOGE at GSA headquarters 10 months ago outlines the plan. Couched as a part of their "AI strategy," Musk's people said they needed to scoop up all government data so AI could use it.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneTo target a "criminal or immigration nexus" the software pulls Americans' personal data from across the government, including data from Health and Human Services and other agencies unrelated to law enforcement. How did ICE and Palantir get all this data together?
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneData protection, as a concept, grew out of post-war legal scholarship in Germany which reflected on the use of data about people by the Nazi Govt, and formulated a set of limits on data use which recognised that to collect and use data about people was to impact the people’s lives.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneWhen they say Me Too "went too far," they mean "got too close."
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneGawker was killed to protect pedophiles
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneAward for late Afrobeat pioneer and political radical is the 'anti-establishment being recognised by the establishment'.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneGawker was sued out of existence by billionaires who didn't want to be investigated by really good journalists who had the perfect rolodexes to get dirt on a pervert cabal and maybe upend their whole new world order. It isn't a scandal sheet you dope.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba Birhanewe said all along that they wanted Gawker dead not because we embarrassed a pro wrestler but because the Epstein story is one Gawker was covering a decade before most other people caught up & was just one of many stories exposing powerful people and their misdeeds
- Among the batch of newly released emails from Jeffrey Epstein: Epstein telling Peter Thiel he would “gladly share…expenses for the Gawker suit.” This was sent the day after @rmac.bsky.social and @mattdrange.bsky.social reported in Forbes that Thiel was behind the lawsuit that would bankrupt Gawker
- Reposted by Dr Abeba Birhanegranular, practical, well organized info here: www.wired.com/story/how-to...
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneThe California State University system spent $16.9 million last year giving ChatGPT to all students, faculty, and staff. We are asking the CSU chancellor not to renew the contract with OpenAI when it expires. Anyone can sign the petition — link below!
- The CSU/OpenAI contract is set to expire June 30, 2026. Sign this petition: actionnetwork.org/petitions/cancel-ch… for the CSU NOT to renew the contract and to use the savings to protect jobs at CSU campuses facing layoffs.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneElon made the world's most un-sellable "truck." He hasn't developed a new car in years. He just shut down production of two models and he can barely sell the cars he is making. So now it's the pipe dream of "automation" keeping his meme stock afloat 🙄 #TeslaTakedown www.theverge.com/transportati...
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneI wonder if the New York Times will go after any of the prominent academics in the Epstein files for being rapists as hard as they went after Claudine Gay for being kind of sloppy with citations in her graduate thesis. If not, why not?
- Reposted by Dr Abeba Birhanewe absolutely need to know who he sent this to. how is this something the public is being kept in the dark on???
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneThe Epstein emails should really end the debate over whether society should have billionaires. "Do you want there to be a class of people so powerful they can fuck your kids and no one will even try to do anything" seems like an easy sell if everyone in politics wasn't trying to get on their payroll
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneSo apparently I was right to shittalk m00t this week because it's been revealed that his boneheaded decision to establish /pol/ and subsequently ruin the website was allegedly born out of a one-on-one meeting with Jeffery Epstein.
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneHow many people here would be interested if I did a digital security/privacy advice blog somewhere?
- putting aside how contemptuous this is towards writers, it puzzles me to see people treat these models as sentient
- Reposted by Dr Abeba Birhane4 Black journalists have been kidnapped by the federal government
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneShot and chaser from new Epstein batch
- Reposted by Dr Abeba BirhaneLAION was nominally taken down, but not after it was likely ingested by hundreds if not thousands of systems. Prabhu and @abeba.bsky.social pointed out the problem with nonconsensuality years earlier, although without pointing to CSAM. ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp....
