How Abeba Birhane is cleaning up AI's dirty data

One day in 2020, Abeba Birhane found herself on Wikipedia, scouring a list of slurs. At the time, Birhane was pursuing a PhD in cognitive science at the University College Dublin and was trying to see how many of those slurs appeared in the image descriptions for a massive data set that’s often used to train AI systems. 

She had already turned up plenty of matches on the obvious filth, but Birhane was running out of ideas for what to search next. “The reason I went to Wikipedia is because I couldn’t think of enough slur words,” she says. 




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