These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI

Today the risks of artificial intelligence are clear — but the warning signs have been there all along

By Lorena O'Neil

TIMNIT GEBRU didn’t set out to work in AI. At Stanford, she studied electrical engineering — getting both a bachelor’s and a master’s in the field. Then she became interested in image analysis, getting her Ph.D. in computer vision. When she moved over to AI, though, it was immediately clear that there was something very wrong.

“There were no Black people — literally no Black people,” says Gebru, who was born and raised in Ethiopia. “I would go to academic conferences in AI, and I would see four or five Black people out of five, six, seven thousand people internationally.… I saw who was building the AI systems and their attitudes and their points of view. I saw what they were being used for, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, we have a problem.’”

When Gebru got to Google, she co-led the Ethical AI group, a part of the company’s Responsible AI initiative, which looked at the social implications of artificial intelligence — including “generative” AI systems, which appear to learn on their own and create new content based on what they’ve learned. She worked on a paper about the dangers of large language models (LLMs), generative AI systems trained on huge amounts of data to make educated guesses about the next word in a sentence and spit out sometimes eerily human-esque text. Those chatbots that are everywhere today? Powered by LLMs.

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