Safiya Noble

Safiya Umoja Noble (born 1970) is an American internet studies scholar and professor at UCLA, where she directs the Center on Race & Digital Justice. Her 2018 book “Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism” documented how Google search returned pornographic and demeaning results for queries like “Black girls,” and argued that algorithmic systems encode the biases of the mostly white, male industry that builds them. The work earned her a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship.

From search to generative AI

As large language models went mainstream, Noble extended her critique to generative AI. She has warned that these systems ingest “basically everything that’s available on the internet” — copyrighted work, scholarship and “random subreddits” alike — “as if these things are all equally reliable,” and that much of what they output simply is not true. She points to image tools refusing to depict Black doctors treating white patients as evidence that discrimination is baked in, not incidental.

Noble’s stance is not that AI is worthless but that it is being deployed prematurely, at scale, over populations who have no say and little recourse. She has become a fixture of the algorithmic-justice movement alongside researchers like Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, pushing for regulation, transparency and accountability before harms compound.