Dr Abeba Birhane: the amount of folx who think that the solution to bias in gen AI/big techs lack of quality data is to mobilise the public to crowdsource quality, labelled training data is astounding. often with no acknowledgement or mention of how this is extractive labour, all for the benefit of tech monopolies

the amount of folx who think that the solution to bias in gen AI/big techs lack of quality data is to mobilise the public to crowdsource quality, labelled training data is astounding. often with no acknowledgement or mention of how this is extractive labour, all for the benefit of tech monopolies

the conflation of "technology" and "products" has been so normalised that people cheer for brands as if they were their high school friend

"don't like the quality of AI content-tagging plantations? have you considered committing your life energy to the service of 80 billion dollars worth of valuation?"

True. There’s an intuitive appeal to creating a commons, but if only the most wealthy property owners can afford to use it, it isn’t a commons at all.

I wish I did not know this. (Also, it won't fix the bias problem! The bias is *prior to* the data, so it won't go away with clean data!)

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