Now is probably the time to announce that I've been writing a book about
@OpenAI
, the AI industry & its impacts. Here is a slice of my book reporting, combined with reporting from the inimitable
@cwarzel
. Inside the year of chaos that led to this weekend.
A story about Danish Siddiqui.
In Feb 2020, I was rehearsing my TEDx talk in India when he, a fellow speaker, sat down next to me to ask about my work. I had no idea who he was. He said simply he was also a journalist. Only later did I realize the humility in that description.
Nine months ago, I learned that Facebook has a Responsible AI team, and has had some form of it since Cambridge Analytica. I began to wonder: what has it been doing these past three years? Nearly four-dozen interviews later, here's what I found.
Over the past few weeks, the Facebook Papers have reaffirmed that FB has fueled the spread of hate speech & misinfo around the world.
But there’s a crucial piece missing from the story. FB isn’t just amplifying misinfo.
The company is also funding it.
Two years ago I discovered scholarship arguing that AI is creating a new colonial world order. The idea haunted me & pushed me to investigate. Today I begin to release my findings: a culmination of reporting across five continents. Here’s my introduction.
If you're wondering what Google was so terrified of
@timnitGebru
publishing, I got a copy of the paper. Here's my best summary of what it says.
Thank you to
@emilymbender
who coauthored the work for sending it my way.
I write words for a living and yet cannot find the right ones to describe the mix of grief, fear, and loss of seeing the news and thinking: I am an Asian woman, too.
I spent half a year digging into
@OpenAI
, the SF-based AI research lab, originally founded by
@elonmusk
. I started with a few simple questions: Who are they? What are their goals? How do they work? After nearly three dozen interviews, I found so much more.
If you’re tuning into Chinese politics for the first time, here are four resources I found useful for understanding what just happened at Party Congress, China's national convening every five years to choose a new leadership team:
It was devastating to wake up this morning & learn he was killed in Afghanistan. There isn't really a moral to this story other than that he was an incredible human. He barely knew me yet treated me with such decency. I can't imagine how many other lives he irrevocably touched.
On the eve of the 2020 election, troll farms were running vast page networks on FB targeting Christian, Black, & Native Americans. An internal report tracking the situation described it as "genuinely horrifying." Some of the pages remain two year later.
At the time he was preparing to fly to Wuhan the next week to document a strange new disease outbreak. I told him he was incredibly brave. He told me it was his wife & kids who had the real courage to say goodbye to him each time he left for another life-threatening assignment.
Danish was in fact a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who'd covered some of the most brutal and dangerous conflicts globally. His photos are so beautiful and grotesque they make you hurt. Compared to him, I was nothing. But never once did he make me feel small.
Over the course of a week-long TEDx program, we spent several hours chatting, including sharing a cab through heavy Mumbai traffic back to the airport. He told me about his incredible love story with his wife, about his adorable kids, about his compulsion to keep doing good work.
I see this argument all the time from tech people: Building gargantuan AI models may be computationally, environmentally, and financially costly. But if those models then go on to solve cancer, isn't that on balance better for the world?
NOOOO.
A thread.
It's weird how much a few conversations can make such a lasting impression. But I was so touched by his humility, warmth, and kinship. I followed his work on Instagram religiously and thought often about when I'd go back to India and take him up on his word.
For years I’ve been interviewing data annotation workers who are the lifeblood of the AI industry. For years I’ve heard the same story: the platforms they work for wield total power, leaving them precarious & vulnerable to exploitation. A horrible example of this just happened 1/
Reporting this thoroughly convinced me that self-regulation does not, cannot work. Facebook has only ever moved on issues because or in anticipation of external regulation. If we have any hope of fixing FB's problems, we can no longer afford to wait for it to do so itself.
Black Panther makes the celebration of women and people of color look so effortless that it makes you wonder what took Hollywood so goddamn long.
#WakandaForever
A
@techreview
investigation has found that Facebook & Google are paying millions of ad dollars to bankroll clickbait actors, fueling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.
Many of these actors *would not exist* without these payments from both platforms.
IT'S HERE!!! The biggest story I’ve ever worked on.
@techreview
's very first interactive ever, which walks through a concrete example of AI bias, and why it’s so much more complicated than initially meets the eye. 1/
A big question looms over generative AI: what really is its impact on the environment? I spent months investigating a single campus of Microsoft data centers in the Arizona desert - designated in part for OpenAI - in an attempt to find out. Thread.
Hello!! Today is my first day at the Wall Street Journal. I’ll be covering China tech & society and moving to Hong Kong in May. So excited to work with such talented colleagues. 😍
This work was not led by NIST. It was led by
@jovialjoy
,
@rajiinio
, and
@timnitGebru
. Really disappointed to see this
@60Minutes
segment. Joy says she spoke to the producers for many hours and yet they still chose not to feature her work.
According to a study conducted by a team of computer scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, many facial recognition algorithms they tested had a harder time making out differences in Black, Asian and female faces.
Oh hey my promotion is official today! I'm thrilled to say I have progressed from senior reporter to senior editor for AI at
@techreview
, and the best part is this is not an April's Fools joke. 🥳
This segment misses a huge detail: Bytedance has distinct apps for the China & US markets because the Chinese and US governments have distinct approaches to digital platform regulation. In other words, when you don't regulate platforms, it can harm kids. Shocking, I know.
“It’s almost like [Chinese company Bytedance] recognize[s] that technology’s influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world,” says Tristan Harris.
After spending a few years cutting through Big Tech's B.S. about AI ethics, I've created a glossary to help you decode what all of their favorite terms actually mean.
I had way too much fun working on this! Threading some of my favorites below.
This piece was so incredibly painful to write. It's not about corrupt people do corrupt things. That would be simple. It's about good people genuinely trying to do the right thing. But they're trapped in a rotten system, trying their best to push the status quo that won't budge.
The
@WSJ
raised a lot of eyebrows with its earlier prediction that Li Qiang, Shanghai's top party official who oversaw its months-long covid lockdown, would make the Standing Committee. We were right. Incredible scoop from the team.
The Shanghai police data heist grows more insane: Experts say the database of nearly 1b Chinese citizens was not hacked—it simply had no password, allowing the thief to waltz in, wipe the data & leave a ransom note: "contact_for_your_data…recovery10btc."
Facebook communications sent me a long list of so-called "factual errors" after the piece.
@glichfield
& I sent them a point by point rebuttal showing that they were in fact not errors. They acquiesced. If you have more "factual errors" you would like to send to me, please do.
@_KarenHao
Yes, that's why your piece was a surprise to me and to many of my colleagues.
From my point of view, you piece is full of factual errors and incorrect assumptions of ill intent.
What happened to you?
The fact that most Chinese scholars can consume ideas & scholarship in English but most American scholars can’t do the same in Chinese will over time become the U.S.’s greatest disadvantage.
I am beyond the moon to announce that today is my first day as a contributing writer for
@TheAtlantic
, focused on AI. I’ve missed this beat so & can’t believe I get to write about it for one of favorite magazines in the world, among such brilliant journalists. Let’s get to work!!
The hardest and most complex story I've ever worked on is publishing tomorrow. Nine months of reporting and writing. So many interviews. So many drafts. I'm honestly in shock that it's almost over? And incredibly anxious for you all to read it.
It's about Facebook.
We decided to publish the report in full. The numbers are astounding. Collectively, the troll-farm pages reached 140M Americans and combined to form the largest Christian American and Black American pages by a massive margin.
I *strongly* disagree with this line of logic. Concentrating resources away from the marginalized in society to the richest in society so that the rich can then decide who to bestow those resources to doesn't make the world a more equitable place.
I downloaded every single AI paper abstract available on one of the largest open research databases to understand where the field has been & where it's going next. After months of data wrangling & head-scratching, I'm excited to finally launch this story.
These pages had also achieved their reach not through user choice but primarily as a result of Facebook’s own platform design and engagement-hungry algorithm.
75% of the users exposed to their content had never followed any of the pages.
After a long two weeks since being forced out by Google, I sat down with
@timnitGebru
to reflect on her time at the company, the future of AI ethics research, & how to hold tech companies accountable. Thank you to Timnit for being open and vulnerable. ❤️
OpenAI marshaled a global pipeline of human labor for 2+ years to enable ChatGPT & GPT-4 to exist.
Workers who dealt with the worst parts are still suffering PTSD more than a year later.
My story with
@dseetharaman
out today on the front page of
@WSJ
.
When a company like Google or Microsoft or OpenAI builds these gargantuan models so that *they,* our benevolent tech dictators, get to exclusively decide what kinds of problems they want their models to tackle, that does NOT make the world a more equitable place!
The pandemic gave AI a chance to prove itself. But after a global effort that led to the development of ~ hundreds ~ of tools to catch covid, not a single one of them helped. Read
@strwbilly
's important story.
I reviewed
@katecrawford
's new book Atlas of AI and interviewed her about why it was so important to her to write it. Tl;dr: It's a masterpiece, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.
Rather than making fun of the lawyer, we should really be asking how these technologies are being marketed in a way that misleads people about the extent of their capabilities and use this as a case study to understand how that can cause real-world harm.
I don’t just mean in foreign policy and defense. I also see this effect in technology. When I talk to American researchers, they have zero idea what’s happening in China. When I talk to Chinese researchers, they are just as fluent in U.S. research as any American.
We know this because of the in-depth field work of disinformation experts like
@riovictoire
, who has made her way inside the private forums where thousands of Cambodian clickbait actors trade tools and tips for how to get bigger payouts from FB and Google.
The report also includes some real nuggets. Like these charts that show how content FB knows to be violating (fuss_recommendation=R) is more likely to receive a higher rate of clicks and shares than content FB believes to be good (=G).
.
@eileenguo
got a hold of the Stanford vaccine-distribution algorithm that left out its residents & we looked at what went wrong. Of note: it's a rule-based algorithm, not a machine-learning one. And it seems like Stanford literally just forgot to test it?
But of course, FB continues to rank content based on engagement, including clicks and shares, which means content more likely to be violating pushes to more users as well as higher up their news feeds.
World, meet Alex, Bill, and Mophat, three workers whose labor was essential to filtering violence and abuse out of ChatGPT.
For the first time they’re ready to tell you who they are—and how the work unraveled their lives and their families.
Meta hired actors during the Hollywood strike to train AI with their expressions & movements, paying as little as $300 to use the data “in perpetuity.” Nuanced story from
@eileenguo
illustrating how the AI industry profits from precarious labor conditions.
I’m so fiercely proud of being Asian-American. And all I can think of right now is, please world, don’t take that away from me. Please don’t make me become afraid or ashamed of my identity. It took me so long to reclaim it.
I wrote about a topic I’ve been itching to address for some time: how AI PR hype, coupled with increasingly flashy AI-generated outputs, is creating a dangerous gap between the technology’s perception & reality. A collab with
@MilesKruppa
.
My biggest takeaway from attending my first AI conference in person since ChatGPT is the level of FOMO that researchers feel about it. So many talks referencing or cracking jokes about ChatGPT. So many researchers trying to intersect their work with ChatGPT to stay relevant.
On top of that name one technology in history that has successfully been redistributed completely equitably from the bastions of privilege and power to the have-nots in society. We've yet to achieve this with even the most basic resources like water, paper, electricity, internet.
I have a big story coming out tomorrow, and I’m very nervous. It took six months of reporting and writing and is based on nearly three dozen interviews. Also the longest piece I’ve ever written with close to 6,000 words. I hope you all find it worthwhile to read. 🙏
I have a big piece about Facebook coming out tomorrow—not part of the FB Papers—that I hope will fill a critical gap in our understanding of the company's impact on the world. So thankful to all of my sources and collaborators on this project. Hope you all read it.
Meta spokesperson Joe Osborne disputed our core findings, saying our analysis was flawed & that we’d misunderstood the issue. But shortly thereafter, the Cambodian clickbait actors began complaining in their online forums that Facebook had cracked down on their monetizing pages.
And from the scholarship of experts like
@jonathan_c_ong
and Jason Vincent A. Cabañes who conducted interviews with clickbait actors in the Philippines about their motivations and tactics in the lead up to the 2016 election of Duterte.
I don't think this is healthy for AI development. With the advent of deep learning, people were already concerned about the collapsing of the field around one technique. Now we're seeing it collapse further around a single AI model. This complete lack of diversity cannot be good.
After 3.5 wonderful, wonderful years
@techreview
, March 30 will be my last day. I still have one more Big Thing coming out in a few weeks, stay tuned. But until then, so much love and gratitude to my colleagues past and present who made TR what it is and me who I am today. ❤️
One of the countries hardest hit by all of this platform-funded clickbait activity? Myanmar. Which the outgoing UN special envoy said in October had deteriorated into civil war.
Why was Google's firing of
@timnitGebru
&
@mmitchell_ai
such a pivotal moment for AI? I spent three months tracing the field's past, present, and future to explain why it matters.
Ever since Google fired
@timnitGebru
&
@mmitchell_ai
, it's continued to deploy the very technology it punished them for scrutinizing. Now hundreds of scientists are racing to investigate the technology's risks before it's too late to avoid its harms.
I profiled Facebook whistleblower
@szhang_ds
, a former data scientist whose extraordinary moral courage gave us an unparalleled look into how the platform enables global political manipulation. Her story is as remarkable as her actions.
Also I cannot express enough how much my editors
@niallfirth
&
@glichfield
helped shape this piece. Niall read through at least six drafts each between 6k & 10k words, and chatted with me late evenings, weekends, pretty much constantly to help me wrap my head around the story.
I also worked with former FB data scientist
@jeff4llen
to identify possible clickbait actors on Facebook, using public data from CrowdTangle and Facebook's publisher lists, which record which publishers are registered in the platform's monetization programs.
In part two of
@techreview
's AI Colonialism series, we take a hard look at Venezuela, where it plunged into economic catastrophe right as the demand for data labeling exploded, turning the country into ground zero for a new model of labor exploitation.
Silicon Valley loves to say data annotation work provides economic opportunity. The tragic thing is it really could if platforms were designed to uplift workers by providing them jobs with regular working hours, security, and stable incomes. The reality is so far from this. 4/
In part three of
@techreview
’s AI Colonialism series, we head to Indonesia, where a strong sense of community has protected ride-hailing drivers from the unforgiving nature of algorithmic management. A playbook of resistance for gig workers globally.
A Trump-era program meant to crackdown on Chinese economic espionage morphed into targeting academics of Chinese descent. Now as the US seeks to defend its global scientific leadership, a growing number of those academics are leaving the US.
Some belated news 😍
So excited to be joining Harvard Kennedy School as a non-residential fellow! I’ll still be doing what I’m doing
@techreview
now but with the expertise & support of two institutions. Excited to dig deeper into AI coverage & take on more challenging projects.
Hey Yann, this is pretty hurtful coming from you. Before my piece came out, you were consistently praising my work and understanding of AI both within Facebook and to me directly. I would hope that it would take more than a critical article for you to reverse that opinion.
@BloombergME
No it doesn't.
Apparently, one can write about AI fairness without paying attention to journalistic fairness.
One of those cases where one knows the reality, reads an article about it, and go "WTF?"
For years the NIH has been investigating scientists with China ties in secret, ending many careers with scant evidence of wrongdoing. But it’s been impossible to get the story out; no one ever wants to talk—until now.
Astounding reporting from
@jeffmervis
So next time you hear someone make this argument, ask yourself: Who are they? Is this argument self-serving to them? Does it let them keep all their wealth and power on the presumption that they will be nice and benevolent?
Yeah...nope. 🙅🏻♀️
In the process of working on this story, I got a front row seat to why we need experts who've worked within platforms like Facebook and Google to collaborate with experts who work in the field.
Experts have warned for years that women, not politicians, are the overwhelming target of deepfakes. Now their worst nightmare has finally happened: an app that requires no coding skills to make nonconsensual porn videos of women.
YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi confirmed the behavior violated Google's policies and terminated all of the YouTube channels MIT Technology Review identified to be spreading misinformation.
Let me first point out how Silicon Valley loooves this narrative. They use the same argument to justify the existence of billionaires. If someone can amass that wealth and then use that money for good, then it also must be on balance good for the world.
My last Big Thing for
@techreview
starts publishing tomorrow: a four-part series about AI, one part a day through the rest of the week. This project has been my life for the last 6 months—one of the hardest yet most rewarding things I've worked on. So anxious for you all to read.
Allen wrote a custom clustering algorithm to find pages posting content in a highly coordinated manner. We then analyzed which clusters had at least one page registered in a monetization program or were heavily promoting content from a page registered with a program.
In his speech today, Xi Jinping reiterated - as it expected - the importance of advancing science & technology to build China into “a modern socialist country.”
Here are some relevant tidbits from the speech, which lasted nearly two hours:
We found over 2,000 pages in both countries engaged in this clickbait-like behavior, targeting speakers of languages used primarily outside the countries where the operations are based. This is also likely an undercount, because not all Facebook pages are tracked by CrowdTangle.
To everyone who has been reading & engaging with my FB story, to all the friends & strangers who are showing up to support me, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.
Nine months ago, I learned that Facebook has a Responsible AI team, and has had some form of it since Cambridge Analytica. I began to wonder: what has it been doing these past three years? Nearly four-dozen interviews later, here's what I found.
I'm so thrilled to announce the launch of The AI Spotlight Series, a program I designed with the
@pulitzercenter
to train 1,000 journalists on AI reporting over the next two years. All trainings will be FREE & mostly virtual. Register now to join us!
Ok I wrote another one for the nerds. 😍 Incredible paper out of
@Caltech
from
@AnimaAnandkumar
,
@kazizzad
, Andrew Stuart & students in which they introduced a new deep-learning technique for finding solutions to differential equations at record speeds.
Thank you also to the incredible people
@techreview
who made this piece possible: Rachel Stein & Andre Vitorio who made the visualizations.
@theEmilyLuong
&
@sparrow47
who finagled the art.
@niallfirth
&
@mat
who did so much editing. And Linda Lowenthal who sharpened the copy.
In part one of
@techreview
’s AI Colonialism series, we head to South Africa, where an emerging privatized surveillance machine is fueling a digital apartheid. An example of how a tech that promised us the future is threatening to send us back to the past.
I'm training a neural network to generate Christmas movie plots when it spits out this gem: "santa claus is actually a demon who lost a bet with an angel"
Who hurt you, neural network. Everything will be okay.
There have been several false rumors and misleading claims circulating on Twitter that have understandably generated confusion about my piece and my reporting. Here are the facts in a thread.
Nine months ago, I learned that Facebook has a Responsible AI team, and has had some form of it since Cambridge Analytica. I began to wonder: what has it been doing these past three years? Nearly four-dozen interviews later, here's what I found.