Dr Abeba Birhane
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abeba.bsky.social
Dr Abeba Birhane
@abeba.bsky.social
49K followers 820 following 3.7K posts
Founder & PI @aial.ie. Assistant Professor of AI, School of Computer Science & Statistics, @tcddublin.bsky.social

AI accountability, AI audits & evaluation, critical data studies. Cognitive scientist by training. Ethiopian in Ireland. She/her
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abeba.bsky.social
"the law does not self-enforce. the law does not self-execute.

there are more parking ticket enforcement in Brussels than there are enforcement of the DMA" Cori
November 7, 2025 at 9:02 AM
abeba.bsky.social
amen!! #Mozfest
November 7, 2025 at 8:53 AM
abeba.bsky.social
Three Moves to Stop Broligarchy (Break, Build, Enforce) by
Cori Crider and Robin Berjon
mzf.st/15

hands down one of the most refreshing talks at MozFest
November 7, 2025 at 8:45 AM
abeba.bsky.social
November 6, 2025 at 9:53 PM
abeba.bsky.social
gee, won’t regulators think of the poor multi-billioners profiting out of theft, environmental destruction, and shitty and harmful tech they keep pushing aggressively into the public
In correspondence to Mr O’Callaghan, Meta said the EU’s data laws should be revised to take better account of “economic interests” and private sector innovation. Meta asked for the Government’s support in taking concerns about the “ineffectiveness” of the existing data protection framework to Ireland’s EU commissioner Michael McGrath, who oversees GDPR rules in his role as justice commissioner. Dublin could also flag the company’s concerns to other European governments, Ms Egan suggested. “We would be grateful for your support for these changes, and for your advocacy at European level to achieve them,” the Meta executive wrote. The correspondence between Meta and Mr O’Callaghan was released to The Irish Times in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. A spokeswoman for Meta said the company did not have any comments to add beyond what it had set out in the letter. A Department of Justice spokesman said Ireland supported the commission’s plan to simplify EU data protection laws. Though any changes had to “get the balance right”, by reducing some administrative burden, “while continuing to protect the fundamental rights of citizens”, he said.
October 31, 2025 at 6:19 PM
abeba.bsky.social
there goes the empty big tech rhetoric of `innovation or regulation’
October 31, 2025 at 6:12 PM
abeba.bsky.social
regulations that are put in place to protect individuals from the wealthiest and most powerful corporations are apparently `out of control’
Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has privately tried to convince the Irish Government to lead a pushback against data protection laws at European Union level, correspondence shows. The interpretation by regulators of strict EU rules that protect individuals’ data and privacy is “completely out of control”, Meta’s chief privacy officer and vice-president Erin Egan told Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan in a May 23rd letter. The correspondence shows Meta has expanded the scope of its campaign against EU regulations to include the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which puts greater obligations on big tech multinationals to safeguard the data of people using their platforms or services. Europe’s approach to data protection requires a total overhaul, Ms Egan told Mr O’Callaghan in her letter.
October 31, 2025 at 6:09 PM
abeba.bsky.social
the tech industry is a threat to scientific knowledge, academic freedom and evidence-driven industry regulation. the industry systematically captures and/or interferes with and undermines independent knowledge production processes that challenge it

arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19894
ABSTRACT Emerging information technologies like social media, search engines, and AI can have a broad impact on public health, political institutions, social dynamics, and the natural world. It is critical to develop a scientific understanding of these impacts to inform evidence-based technology policy that minimizes harm and maximizes benefits. Unlike most other global-scale scientific challenges, however, the data necessary for scientific progress are generated and controlled by the same industry that might be subject to evidence-based regulation. Moreover, technology companies historically have been, and continue to be, a major source of funding for this field. These asymmetries in information and funding raise significant concerns about the potential for undue industry influence on the scientific record. In this Perspective, we explore how technology companies can influence our scientific understanding of their products. We argue that science faces unique challenges in the context of technology research that will require strengthening existing safeguards and constructing wholly new ones.
October 24, 2025 at 4:03 PM
abeba.bsky.social
"under-appreciated fact: large corporations have internal policy teams with 100s of employees whose full-time jobs are to study the global policy environment, advise their companies on political matters, and seek to influence the policy process." www.andrewbenjaminhall.com/HallSun25.pdf
In this paper, we define and measure a previously unstudied channel by which companies react to, and attempt to shape, politics: internal policy teams. We use the text of more than 100,000 job listings to classify the roles of roughly 100 million workers, identifying more than 250,000 individuals working in policy roles in the US. We estimate that policy teams are—very roughly—13 times larger in size than lobbying teams, on average, and are increasing in size relative to lobbyists and other corporate positions over the last two decades. Policy teams and lobbyists appear to be complements; both across firms and within, increases in lobbying predict increases in policy team size. But policy team members are quite different from lobbyists: they are much less likely to have previous government experience, and they are less balanced in terms of their partisanship. Taken together, our findings show that corporations invest far more in politics than previously recognized, and suggest that a significant part of this investment goes towards developing internal expertise and communicating with a broader set of policymakers and policy-adjacent actors, rather than towards quid-pro-quo lobbying
October 24, 2025 at 3:09 PM
abeba.bsky.social
the flaw in this logic is that all commercial llms (by opeAI, google, anthropic etc) hardly share information about their models inc training data, evaluation processes or benchmarks. they basically operate under a “trust me bro” attitude. hence why this analogy is misguided and/or flat out wrong
Of Models and Tin Men- A behavioural economics study of principal-agent problems in AI alignment using large-language models One of the challenges in assessing the capability and safety of LLMs is their opacity; AI safety researchers sometimes refer to them as “giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers” [6]. Since many of their capabilities emerge down- stream, we cannot reason about their high-level functioning theoretically from first principles, but rather we have to resort to empirical enquiry and actual experiments (c.f. [7, 8, 9]). This is analogous to using the scientific method to understand human cognition. The human brain is similarly opaque, and therefore behavioural psychologists test their hypotheses using controlled experiments with human subjects. Accordingly, researchers have started to adapt empirical methods from cognitive psychology [10], and behavioural economics [11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 14], to the study of large-language models
October 18, 2025 at 2:47 PM
abeba.bsky.social
brought to you by the same company that is building you “agentic” ai and “agi”
October 15, 2025 at 6:21 PM
abeba.bsky.social
a lot of technical jargon to say surveillance and AI pseudoscience

(from a cfp for an AI conference that somehow landed in my inbox)
Gaze modeling and interpretation, Social network loneliness, Gesture interaction for AR applications Sharing gestures in remote collaboration, AV mirrors Eye Gaze and hand gesture sharing Physiological sensing in VR Individualized VR for mental health Generative-AI for human experience development AI for human digital twins Integration of XR in primary education
October 15, 2025 at 1:55 PM
abeba.bsky.social
i don't have the words to emphasise how seriously bad things are gonna get
October 14, 2025 at 8:18 PM
abeba.bsky.social
🤦🏾‍♀️
in order to align llms with human values, we use llms to base our understanding of human values
reads: Given the financial and logistical challenges linked to human annotation, we choose to employ the feedback generated by the GPT-3.5-turbo API as a substitute for human feedback.
October 13, 2025 at 4:47 PM
abeba.bsky.social
friday vibes
October 10, 2025 at 3:34 PM
abeba.bsky.social
we wrote this over 5 yrs ago

dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...
October 9, 2025 at 8:56 PM
abeba.bsky.social
an ai video of Sam Altman shoplifting but much more interesting what's in the training data. there's no way these models can reimagine camera viewpoints unless a nearest neighbour exists in the training dataset. looks like target video feed must have entered the dataset
October 6, 2025 at 12:39 PM
abeba.bsky.social
sigh
I have attached my CV and academic transcripts for your review. I would be happy to provide any additional information you might need. Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to hearing from you. Best regards, [Your Name] [Your Contact Information]
October 6, 2025 at 9:03 AM
abeba.bsky.social
Robot personhood/rights is conceptually bogus and legally puts more power/rights in the hands of those that develop and deploy robots/AI systems

firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...
October 5, 2025 at 8:28 PM
abeba.bsky.social
Yesterday the Royal Society held a series of panels & keynotes in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Turing Test. The unanimous critical takes on AGI, big tech's power concentration & the call for urgent action left me w hope things might be turning

Watch here m.youtube.com/live/GmnBTCK...
October 3, 2025 at 6:38 PM
abeba.bsky.social
saw this at heathrow airport. i can't see it appealing to anyone but fraudsters and scammers
October 3, 2025 at 5:41 PM
abeba.bsky.social
October 2, 2025 at 10:20 PM
abeba.bsky.social
for a longer explanation firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...
September 30, 2025 at 10:31 PM
abeba.bsky.social
I was part of a working group on AI and Fraternity assembled by the Vatican. We met in Rome and worked on this over two days. I am happy to share the result of that intense effort: a Declaration we presented to the Pope and other government authorities

coexistence.global
In this spirit of fraternity, hope and caution, we call upon your leadership to uphold the following principles and red lines to foster dialogue and reflection on how AI can best serve our entire human family: Human life and dignity: AI must never be developed or used in ways that threaten, diminish, or disqualify human life, dignity, or fundamental rights. Human intelligence – our capacity for wisdom, moral reasoning, and orientation toward truth and beauty – must never be devalued by artificial processing, however sophisticated. AI must be used as a tool, not an authority: AI must remain under human control. Building uncontrollable systems or over-delegating decisions is morally unacceptable and must be legally prohibited. Therefore, development of superintelligence (as mentioned above) AI technologies should not be allowed until there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and there is clear and broad public consent. Accountability: only humans have moral and legal agency and AI systems are and must remain legal objects, never subjects. Responsibility and liability reside with developers, vendors, companies, deployers, users, institutes, and governments. AI cannot be granted legal personhood or “rights”. Life-and-death decisions: AI systems must never be allowed to make life or death decisions, especially in military applications during armed conflict or peacetime, law enforcement, border control, healthcare or judicial decisions. Independent testing and adequate risk assessment must be required before deployment and throughout the entire lifecycle. Stewardship: Governments, corporations, and anyone else should not weaponize AI for any kind of domination, illegal wars of aggression, coercion, manipulation, social scoring, or unwarranted mass surveillance. Responsible design: AI should be designed and independently evaluated to avoid unintentional and catastrophic effects on humans and society, for example through design giving rise to deception, delusion, addiction, or loss of autonomy. No AI monopoly: the benefits of AI – economic, medical, scientific, social – should not be monopolized. No Human Devaluation: design and deployment of AI should make humans flourish in their chosen pursuits, not render humanity redundant, disenfranchised, devalued or replaceable. Ecological responsibility: our use of AI must not endanger our planet and ecosystems. Its vast demands for energy, water, and rare minerals must be managed responsibly and sustainably across the whole supply chain. No irresponsible global competition: We must avoid an irresponsible race between corporations and countries towards ever more powerful AI.
September 23, 2025 at 5:33 PM
abeba.bsky.social
how much did google pay to slip an entire magazine of corporate propaganda into this weekend's @irishtimes.com newspaper disguised as public communication about AI
September 21, 2025 at 6:10 PM