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Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

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Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#81

Post by bayindirh »

techbusters wrote: post #27
timnit-drama wrote: post #15

The email she posted [1] makes it pretty clear that she sent an email with some demands/conditions (separate from the one "to Brain women and allies") and said that she would resign if they weren't met. Google said they wouldn't agree to them, accepted her threatened resignation, and told her it was effective immediately. Without knowing more context, it sounds like she tried to do some hardball negotiating by threat…

There is still a civil way to accept a resignation, with proper timelines and transfer of responsibilities. She offered to resign in some time due to some demands, and the immediate termination seems to be related to an email unrelated to those demands. This sounds a lot like a sleazy move by Google to couch an immediate firing as a resignation.

You're right but, the tone of the mail hints that there's an underlying tension already. Also, the mention of other email (which I didn't read) further hints that there's something heated going on amongst the parties.

So looks like Timnit sent an e-mail to the group which wasn't OK in the eyes of the higher management, then sent a strong mail about her demands to the same management and used "I'll resign otherwise" card to force her way.

The management, agitated from the first e-mail, didn't buy it and sent her home. The way they did is neither elegant nor polite but, she pushed a lot to get this response it seems.

This is my understanding of the issue and I may be completely wrong but, this is what I was able to decipher.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#82

Post by jariel »

jonathankoren wrote: post #61
jariel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google did the right thing and they were civil. She made some pretty serious demands, not having been met, with such politicization there's no reasonable way to accommodate a longer handoff, and she knew that. Waaay too much risk there. She set her own terms, they accepted, that's it. She should have been more transparent in this, because in her Tweets she wasn't forthcoming that it was her terms. There are a ton of…

Do we even know what her demands were? I haven’t seen them posted anywhere. That said, it’s not behooven on either party to be transparent — to the public, or even other employees — because that’s just lawsuit bait. All we know is that she gave a hardball ultimatum, and Google accepted option 2. I don’t know enough about what’s going on, but if you say “Do this, or I quit,” you have to be prepared for them to show yo…

It doesn't matter really what they were other than we know she offered to resign if they were not met.

"“Do this, or I quit,” you have to be prepared for them to show you the door immediately. That’s how at-will employment works."

That's pretty much it.

She must be smart enough to know better and possibly she was looking for an exit of some kind.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#83

Post by compycom »

twentytwo11 wrote: post #22
dogecoinbase wrote: post #19

It's incredibly disappointing to see the first batch of top-level comments here. Timnit is an absolute leader and inspiration in the field, and has been outspoken in dragging the old school of machine-learning-is-money-laundering-for-bias crowd into modernity. This move makes it clear that Google has no commitment to Ethical AI as a field; they want rhetorical cover for their ongoing bad actions.

According to her, Yann LeCun is a racist just because he said that a specific ML model was biased due to a bias in the data and not because ML learning as a research field was racist. Such an inspiration!

She didn't call him a racist. She pointed out that there's more to addressing bias than just acknowledging that it's there. If you are going to say "Well, garbage-in, garbage-out!", why do you keep putting the racist garbage in? Why do you, knowing of the problem, keep using biased sources of data, knowing of the potential harms?

That's the deeper question ML research/industry has to grapple with. When these models are deployed increasingly quickly and at scale in ways that can potentially cause massive harm, why is it okay to keep doing the same exact harmful things?

LeCun mentioned that there would have been opposite problem if it were trained on a dataset from Senegal. But why wasn't it trained on a dataset from Senegal? Why do we always see these errors where white-centric datasets produce white-centric results?

It's obvious that while it would be a symmetric situation a vacuum, we do not live in a vacuum. We live in a world with deep sociocultural biases in favor and against various racial groups. And it is unjust to let AI perpetuate and entrench these biases by acting at with this bias at scale.

Acknowledging dataset bias by itself doesn't address the bias meaningfully. In practice, we often treat the bias as an exogenous factor when it is not, moving it outside the scope of our responsibility. But it is very much the product of our work, a reflection of our choices, values, and beliefs about what to prioritize. We can't abdicate our responsibility for it (even if we choose not to prioritize it.)

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#84

Post by astrange »

throwaway-kmc wrote: post #65
astrange wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LeCunn calmly and rationally explained that a particular model produced biased results, and that that this was due to the bias in its training data. But this claim is certainly not necessarily correct, and he shouldn't have been so confident about it. Any part of a system can contribute to bias and that includes the model design, not just the data. If they want the system to work then they need to actually demonstr…

I think it is reasonable for one of the founders and most highly respected members of the field to make confident claims about something that is as open and shut as this. The paper in question was training a network to upres faces. The researchers trained it on a dataset containing primarily White faces and released it on GitHub for reproducibility. Subsequent people used it on Black faces and found it make them whit…

> I’m not sure what else there is possibly wrong here. Is the width of their convolutions racist?

Not that parameter specifically, but if you say the data is wrong then that means any other parameter might be wrong too. More data might mean the model is too small to fit it, or the hyperparameters might be wrong to train it, or you now have the wrong ratio of other phenotypes (let's say that instead of races…) in the training set and their results regress.

Also, if you're adding people with darker skin, that of course means the pixel values are lower. That matters for image processing code, things like SAD thresholds or noise reduction will work differently.

> Their choice to work on super resolution?

Superresolution is only useful as a toy and they should have mentioned that when they put up a live colab, yes. They added a disclaimer later on and it was good - there was a big issue where people were convinced this was somehow a surveillance technology because they watched too many TV shows, even though it literally can't work that way!

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#85

Post by compycom »

fullstackPM wrote: post #58
astrange wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LeCunn calmly and rationally explained that a particular model produced biased results, and that that this was due to the bias in its training data. But this claim is certainly not necessarily correct, and he shouldn't have been so confident about it. Any part of a system can contribute to bias and that includes the model design, not just the data. If they want the system to work then they need to actually demonstr…

Wouldn't that go both ways though? Why was Gebru so confident that the bias is because of something else other than the training dataset? She immediately assumed that there are other items contributing to the bias and devolved the quality of the conversation as well by making those claims in a frustrated/exasperated tone. The most obvious and easiest way to clear this up would be for the original researches to train…

The whole point is that it never is trained on a "Senegal" dataset, is it? Why do we always see these errors where white-centric datasets produce white-centric results?

While it would be a symmetric situation a vacuum, we do not live in a vacuum. And acknowledging dataset bias by itself doesn't address the bias meaningfully. In practice, we often treat the bias as an exogenous factor when it is not, moving it outside the scope of our responsibility. But it is very much the product of our work, a reflection of our choices, values, and beliefs about what to prioritize. We can't abdicate our responsibility for it; the stakes are too high.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#86

Post by bigbubba »

square_usual wrote: post #12
throwaway-kmc wrote: post #4

All this says is, she sent a mail to Brain Women and Allies that resulted in her immediate termination. Does anyone else remember when she picked a fight with Yann LeCunn by deliberately misinterpreting his remarks to cast him as a racist? Seems reasonable to assume she picked another fight. Reading the Twitter threat, it reads like she made demands in a way visible to a large number of employees (something about aut…

It's not "reasonable" to assume "she picked a fight". It's not "reasonable" to fire someone for "picking a fight", whatever that is. It's awful how people are willing to be so charitable to Google here after doing the exact opposite in Damore's case.

People get fired for picking fights all the time. You say that's not reasonable, but what's reasonable about subjecting all the other employees at a company to somebody who picks fights?

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#87

Post by k4tz »

tolbish wrote: post #66
spicyramen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fake news, I'm underrepresented and I never felt like one, I hate playing the minority card and I just focus on being a top performer. Some teams at Google cry all day specially non-eng folks playing the minority card because their work can't be quantified. So they mix up their lack of skills with race BS. I was a SWE and was actually pay very fairly for the work I did, that was my presentation card.

> I'm underrepresented and I never felt like one What does this mean? That you don't feel like the race you actually are because you don't play the race card? I hope I misread that and there is a more charitable explanation.

The most charitable interpretation would be something like "I'm underrepresented and I never felt like I was part of the out-group"

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#88

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

compycom wrote: post #85
fullstackPM wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that go both ways though? Why was Gebru so confident that the bias is because of something else other than the training dataset? She immediately assumed that there are other items contributing to the bias and devolved the quality of the conversation as well by making those claims in a frustrated/exasperated tone. The most obvious and easiest way to clear this up would be for the original researches to train…

The whole point is that it never is trained on a "Senegal" dataset, is it? Why do we always see these errors where white-centric datasets produce white-centric results? While it would be a symmetric situation a vacuum, we do not live in a vacuum. And acknowledging dataset bias by itself doesn't address the bias meaningfully. In practice, we often treat the bias as an exogenous factor when it is not, moving it outside…

Does exogenous vs endogenous work in a vacuum either? It’s exogenous with respect to some things and endogenous with respect to others.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#89

Post by ncn »

dogecoinbase wrote: post #19

It's incredibly disappointing to see the first batch of top-level comments here. Timnit is an absolute leader and inspiration in the field, and has been outspoken in dragging the old school of machine-learning-is-money-laundering-for-bias crowd into modernity. This move makes it clear that Google has no commitment to Ethical AI as a field; they want rhetorical cover for their ongoing bad actions.

“This move makes it clear that Google has no commitment to Ethical AI as a field” >> Lol give me a break. You have no idea what was in the email she sent and what she asked for. She gave them an ultimatum. They rejected it. Its at will employment

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#90

Post by MaximumYComb »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #75
bryan_w wrote: post #39

The comments here are weird right now. They seem overly focused on the spat she and Yann LeCun had a while back when it doesn't seem like this incident is about that? Hopefully some clarification comes out about what her demands were and the internet drops their pitchfork about something that happened long ago

It's a pattern of behavior. She had a thread just last week calling her employers "a bunch of privileged White men" and complaining that they were disrespecting her by not letting her work on some unspecified research project. https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331757629996109824

How does she think that's acceptable? You don't slander your boss in public unless you think you're untouchable or you want out.
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