This is the recording of a panel which was part of the "AI Workers' Inquiry" workshop that DAIR, Collective Action in Tech (CAiT), and ACM Strike School held at the FAccT Conference in Athens, Greece, in June 2025.

The panel, moderated by Michelle Bao, included:

You can learn more about the workshop at https://ai-workers-inquiry.github.io/.

After many months of making fun of the term "vibe coding," Emily and Alex tackle the LLMs-as-coders fad head-on, with help from security researcher Susanna Cox. From one person's screed that proclaims everyone not on the vibe-coding bandwagon to be crazy, to the grandiose claim that LLMs could be the "opposable thumb" of the entire world of computing. It's big yikes, all around.

Susanna Cox is a consulting AI security researcher and a member of the core author team at OWASP AI Exchange.

References:

My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts

LLMs: the opposable thumb of computing

A disastrous day in the life of a vibe coder

Also referenced:

Signal president Meredith Whittaker on the fundamental security problem with agentic AI

The "S" in MCP stands for security

Our Opinions Are Correct: The Turing Test is Bullshit

AI Hell:

Sam Altman: The (gentle) singularity is already here

What do the boosters think reading is, anyway?

Meta's climate model made up fake CO2 removal ideas

Ongoing lawsuit means all your ChatGPT conversations will be saved

"Dance like you're part of the training set"

Some Guy tries to mansplain Signal to…Signal's president

WSJ headline claims ChatGPT "self-reflection", gets dunked

You can check out future streams at on Twitch, and send us any AI Hell you see for future episodes.

Our book, The AI Con, is out! Get your copy now.

Follow Emily: Bluesky/Mastodon

Music: Toby Menon.

What is decentralized social media? What is the Fediverse? What is BlackSky? In this event co-hosted with heuristic instruments, our panelists discuss their vision for the future of the Black web experience.

Catt Small is a game maker, and developer. She has worked with companies of all sizes including Asana, Etsy, and SoundCloud. She started programming interactive games around the age of 10 and has been going ever since. In her spare time, Catt makes awkward video games, writes, and draws artwork of all kinds. You can view her work at cattsmall.com.

Ra'il I'Nasah Kiam is an activist, artist and independent scholar from Atlanta who was one of the first people that identified the growing online threat of white nationalism and hate organizing in online spaces. They continue this work in the fediverse.

Rudy Fraser is a technologist, community organizer, and founder of Blacksky Algorithms, where he builds decentralized social media infrastructure that prioritizes community-driven safety, data ownership, and interoperability. As a Fellow at the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, he advances research and development on technology that empowers marginalized communities, particularly Black users.

Roland X. Pulliam (moderator) is a creative technologist with over 20 years of professional graphic design and web development experience that he has used to create experiences for clients like BMW, Toyota and the University of Belize. After founding Play Vicious in 2017, he discovered a need for more robust safety and moderation tools for independent social media platforms and created Fipamo and The Bad Space to help protect marginalized communities.

Through our Possible Futures blog series, we are exploring what the world can look like when technology is designed and deployed for the benefit of all. These broad, near-future speculative pieces are designed to de-center dominant narratives and challenge us all to realize that things can be different. These are not alternative realities; they are possible futures. We celebrated the power of these possibilities in an event on Friday, April 11, 2025.

This panel on the importance of imagination features DAIR's Adrienne Williams, Dylan Baker, and Pauline Wee, with moderation from Adio Dinika.

Through our Possible Futures blog series, we are exploring what the world can look like when technology is designed and deployed for the benefit of all. These broad, near-future speculative pieces are designed to de-center dominant narratives and challenge us all to realize that things can be different. These are not alternative realities; they are possible futures. We celebrated the power of these possibilities in an event on Friday, April 11, 2025.

This panel featured DAIR's Nyalleng Moorosi, Meron Estefanos, and Asmelash Teka Hadgu, with moderation from Timnit Gebru.

For Stochastic Parrots Day 2023, an anonymous data worker from Kenya shares his experience in the labor of training AI language models, and Milagros Miceli and Safiya Noble share their research about exploited data workers. Moderated by Timnit Gebru.

Dr. Milagros Miceli leads the Data, Algorithmic Systems, and Ethics research group at Weizenbaum-Institut and is a research fellow at DAIR, where she investigates how ground-truth data for machine learning is produced.

Richard (who only wants to use his first name) is an entrepreneur and data worker who has worked on data labeling and content moderation for different types of models including ChatGPT and DALL-E (see this article).

Dr. Safiya Noble is a professor at UCLA, the co-founder and co-director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry and the author of Algorithms of Oppression.

For Stochastic Parrots Day 2023, Asmelash Teka Hadgu, Mark Riedl, and Belzie Mont-Louis discuss the hype surrounding applications for AI and how it is affecting their work as educators, translators, and researchers. With moderation by Emily Bender.

Belzie Mont-Louis is a 7-12 instructional coach at Boston Latin Academy and has been an educator for almost two decades, serving as a teacher, teacher leader, and instructional coach.

Asmelash Teka Hadgu is the co-founder and CTO of Lesan AI, where he has built state-of-the-art machine translation systems to and from Amharic, Tigrinya and English.

Dr. Mark Riedl is a professor at Georgia Tech and the associate director of the Georgia Tech Machine Learning Center, performing research that focuses on human-centered artificial intelligence.

For Stochastic Parrots Day 2023, Sarah Andrew, Steven Zapata, and Nanjala Nyabola discuss what actions might be taken to combat the harms of misapplied large language models and other generative AI. With moderation by Angelina McMillan-Major.

Steven Zapata is a professional designer, illustrator, and educator who has over a decade of experience, and has been raising awareness about the impacts of generative systems.

Nanjala Nyabola is a writer, political analyst, and activist based in Nairobi, Kenya, who writes extensively about African society and politics, in particular Kenya, alongside discussions of technology, international law, and feminism.

Sarah Andrew is the legal director of Avaas, a nonprofit organization that promotes global activism on issues such as climate change, human rights, animal rights, corruption, poverty, and conflict.

For Stochastic Parrots Day 2023, Angelina McMillan-Taylor, Timnit Gebru, and Emily M. Bender discuss their 2021 paper, 'On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?' With moderation by Margaret Mitchell.

Angelina McMillan-Major is a computational linguist working on her PhD at the University of Washington, with her dissertation focusing on collaboratively planning language datasets with language communities.

Dr. Emily M. Bender is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington, the faculty director of the CLMS program and the director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory.

Dr. Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute, which focuses on independent community rooted AI research free from Big Tech’s pervasive influence.

Dr. Margaret Mitchell is a computer scientist and chief ethics researcher at Hugging Face, where she focuses on machine learning and ethics-informed AI development in tech.

DAIR Executive Director Timnit Gebru holds a conversation with Research Fellow Meron Estefanos, in which they talked about Meron’s activism as a refugee advocate who has rescued more than 16,000 victims of trafficking. Meron discusses the extent to which she has faced transnational repression in the course of her work, and how calls to attack her on social media result in violence: for example, after calls to injure her circulated on Facebook and Twitter, she was attacked eight times in a single evening. Timnit concludes with a discussion of how refugees are the first to experience the harms of experimental AI technology on the ground. You can learn more about Meron’s work in the 2013 documentary Sound of Torture and this episode of the podcast This American Life.

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