AI for good, with caveats: How a keynote speaker was censored during an international artificial intelligence summit

GENEVA, Switzerland — On Tuesday, United Nations’ flagship platform for artificial intelligence, The AI for Good Global Summit 2025, kicked off in Geneva. But the commencement of the summit wasn’t without controversy. Hours before the keynote speaker, Abeba Birhane—founder and lead of the TCD AI Accountability Lab (AIAL) and one of Time magazine’s 2023 100 Most Influential People in AI—was set to take the stage, she was asked by organizers to remove some of her slides.

Specifically, the organizers wanted Birhane to “remove anything that mentions ‘Palestine’ ‘Israel’ and replace ‘genocide’ with ‘war crimes‘” and “a slide that explains illegal data torrenting by Meta.”

“In the end, it was either remove everything that names names (big tech particularly) and remove logos or cancel my talk,” Birhane, whose research focuses on algorithmic bias and AI ethics and fairness, wrote in a Bluesky post.

Whelp I guess we now know you can't beat the TESCREAL cult by showing up to their propaganda summits and trying to do a TED Talk.

2 comments

GENEVA, Switzerland — On Tuesday, United Nations’ flagship platform for artificial intelligence, The AI for Good Global Summit 2025, kicked off in Geneva. But the commencement of the summit wasn’t without controversy. Hours before the keynote speaker, Abeba Birhane—founder and lead of the TCD AI Accountability Lab (AIAL) and one of Time magazine’s 2023 100 Most Influential People in AI—was set to take the stage, she was asked by organizers to remove some of her slides.
Specifically, the organizers wanted Birhane to “remove anything that mentions ‘Palestine’ ‘Israel’ and replace ‘genocide’ with ‘war crimes‘” and “a slide that explains illegal data torrenting by Meta.”
“In the end, it was either remove everything that names names (big tech particularly) and remove logos or cancel my talk,” Birhane, whose research focuses on algorithmic bias and AI ethics and fairness, wrote in a Bluesky post.
Whelp I guess we now know you can't beat the TESCREAL cult by showing up to their propaganda summits and trying to do a TED Talk.
The world is slipping further and further away from common people.