AI for good, with caveats: How a keynote speaker was censored during an international artificial intelligence summit
Q&A with Abeba Birhane on how she was censored during the AI for Good summit and how the industry can do better.
Hasnain says:
“Then we started negotiating. I opened my laptop; we started going slide by slide through my talk, removing bits every time. One of the main concerns for them was one of the slides I had indicated no AI for war crimes, and it had logos of Microsoft, Amazon, Google Cloud, Palantir, and Cisco; they wanted me to remove that. I had removed a lot of things already. I removed content that mentioned Gaza, Palestine, Israel. I edited “genocide” to “war crimes.” I had removed a slide that connected Meta with illegal data torrenting practices. For me, that was the limit. So, they went and discussed it and came back and said if I don’t remove that one image, or add hundreds of other logos on that slide so that it doesn’t incriminate those particular companies that were identified, I couldn’t give the talk. “
Posted on 2025-07-13T17:34:50+0000