Timnit Gebru Is Calling Attention to the Pitfalls of AI - WSJ

As a leading researcher on the ethics of artificial intelligence, Timnit Gebru has long believed that machine-learning algorithms could one day power much of our lives. What she didn't predict was just how quickly this would happen. "I didn't imagine people would be like, 'Let's replace lawyers with a chatbot,' or'Let's sell AI generated art that looks exactly like someone else's,'" she says over video from her home in California's Bay Area. "I didn't anticipate using chatbots in search engines, which is a bonkers idea that everyone is now racing to do." Dr. Gebru, 39, is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), a nonprofit she launched in 2021 with backing from the MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and others.