Abeba Birhane

Abeba Birhane

An Ethiopian-born cognitive scientist whose audits of the large image-text datasets scraped from the web, including 80 Million Tiny Images and the LAION collections, documented racist and misogynistic content and non-consensual imagery at scale, and led directly to one dataset being withdrawn by its creators. Her theoretical work on relational ethics argues that harm cannot be assessed by inspecting a model in isolation, only in the relationships and contexts it acts within. She has worked at Trinity College Dublin and Mozilla, and leads the AI Accountability Lab. (See also: Training data, Algorithmic bias, Timnit Gebru, Data annotation)