AI for Good [Appearance?] -- Abeba Birhane's reflections on the last minute censorship of her keynote at the AI for Good Summit 2025

https://aial.ie/blog/2025-ai-for-good-summit/

"I was invited to deliver a keynote speech at the ‘AI for Good Summit’ this year, and I arrived at the venue with an open mind and hope for change. With a title “AI for social good: the new face of technosolutionism” and an abstract that clearly outlines the need to question what “good” is and the importance of confronting power, it wouldn’t be difficult to guess what my keynote plans to address. I had hoped my invitation to the Summit was a beginning of engaging in critical self-reflection for the community. However, my experience at the Summit has made me realise that the Summit is not only a ‘faux good’, but it is also a threat to freedom of speech, industry accountability, and genuine social good.

This is what happened: Two hours before I was to take Centre Stage for my keynote, the organisers approached me without prior warning and informed me that they had flagged my talk and it needs substantial altering. Over the next hour, I had to sit in intense negotiations where the only choices I was given were to either change the keynote into a fireside chat with no visuals or to remove some apparently objectionable items from my slide. Thinking that it would be better to deliver some of the message than none, I continued with this charade where we went through my slide deck reviewing each slide and removing anything that mentions “Gaza” or “Palestine” or “Israel” and editing the word “genocide” to “war crimes” untill a single slide that called for “No AI for War Crimes” remained. That is where I drew the line. I was then told that displaying that slide was not acceptable and I had to withdraw, a decision they reversed about 10 minutes later and shortly before I got on the Centre Stage."

#AI #genocide