Dr. Timnit Gebru is a fearless computer scientist who has long refused to play by Big Tech’s rules.
The Ethiopian-born Eritrean AI ethics researcher took center stage at AfroTech in a riveting fireside chat with her former Google colleague X Eyee. Aptly titled “The Human Cost of Smarter Systems,” the conversation explored the loopholes, limitations, and consequences of artificial intelligence.
Sporting her signature fro and patterned layers, Gebru was unapologetic. She recalled how her 2018 Gender Shades study with Joy Buolamwini exposed racial and gender bias in facial analysis tools. “Years later, it was a Black man who was the first person to be wrongfully accused of a crime based on face recognition systems in Detroit,” Gebru said.
“All this talk about super intelligence, it’s because you don’t see the data workers doing grunt work,” she added. “There are hundreds of millions of data workers around the world, most of them in the global majority countries but also here in the U.S., often in vulnerable communities.”
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AI Hype and Corporate Accountability
Gebru also questioned what the rush to cash in on AI was doing to the industry.
“Right now we are in one of perhaps the biggest AI summers ever. If you say you use AI, you are 15% to 50% more likely to get VC funding,” she said. “So, because of that, people literally hire what we call AI impersonators to pretend to be chatbots.”
Gebru also raised concerns about the harm chatbots can cause, pointing to the case of Sewell Setzer Jr. Blaming AI for “going rogue,” she argued, makes it harder to hold the companies that built and released it accountable.
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Gebru drew widespread attention in 2020 when Google fired her as co-lead of its Ethical AI team after a dispute over a separate paper she co-authored on the risks of large language models. She later founded the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), where she serves as executive director.
Her forthcoming memoir, Deep Unlearning: The Rise of AI and the Radicalization of a Tech Idealist, follows her journey from Ethiopia to Silicon Valley. It’s available for preorder and will be released in the U.S. on February 16, 2027.
