Timnit Gebru and Other Black Women Researchers are Working to Change The AI Industry as We Know It

Black women are disrupting the tech industry across the globe, and Timnit Gebru is leading the charge. As a computer scientist and well known advocate for diversity in artificial intelligence, Gebru ruffled feathers at her former employer Google when she co-authored a paper on how AI can underpin racism, sexism, homophobia, and other oppressive forms. When she refused to retract her work, she found out via email that she had been fired.

Her separation from the company, (which Google attempted to classify as a resignation) made headlines in the tech world and beyond which jolted thousands of Google employees into action, many resigning in solidarity with Gebru.

Now one year later, Gebru is reimagining the potential impact of AI with the launch of DAIR, Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, “a space for independent, community-rooted AI research free from Big Tech’s pervasive influence,” as described by the organization’s website. Part of Gebru’s new vision is to move away from Mark Zuckerburg’s old Facebook motto to “move fast and break things.”

DAIR’s mission is to identify technologies that have the potential to cause harm at the onset of the creation process as opposed to running into the fire after the damage has been done. “If those are our values, we can’t achieve them without slowing down and without putting in more resources per project that we’re working on,” she told NBC News.

With nearly $4 million dollars in grant funding awarded to DAIR from backers such as The MacArthur Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and others, the institute will have the space and support to move at a pace that is less traditional than that of the academic and tech industries.

Researchers will be chosen from all over the world, instead of being recruited from U.S. based tech hubs. They will also be encouraged to share their findings in accessible ways via websites and other forms of data visualization.

DAIR joins the ranks of other Black women led research institutions working to create a more ethical AI industry including; Data for Black Lives, founded by Yeshimabeit Milner, the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab founded by Ruha Benjamin, and the Algorithmic Justice League founded by Joy Buolamwini.

In a paper published in 2018 co-authored by Gebru and Buolamwini, researchers found that facial recognition software misidentified dark skinned women at significantly higher rates than lighter skinned men. The two researchers have joined forces once again in the founding and the sustaining of DAIR.

“DAIR’s focus on research that centers the lived experiences of the excoded — those impacted by algorithmic harms — is a necessary intervention in a tech ecosystem that so often excludles, exploits, and expunges the very people who can transform the industry from within and without,” Buolamwini told NBC News.

The women are both hopeful that this new approach to AI research that incentivizes funding based upon its community impact, and not the speed at which it is produced.