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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

#171

Post by tzs »

compycom wrote: post #83
twentytwo11 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> 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?

Probably because it was a research AI not a production AI. Having a very diverse dataset at that stage doesn’t help with your research, so it is fine to use whatever is easily available.

At that stage, you are trying to show that your approach can work in some cases. Once you've got that, it is time to expand the research with a wider range of inputs to find out what the limits of your approach are.

For example, if I were trying to make a US English speech to text transcription system, I might start with recordings of assorted NPR programs, because NRP often makes the recording available online along with they transcripts.

That would be great for determining if my basic approach has promise. Once I have determined that, so know that the whole endeavor is not just a waste of time, I could go looking for data that includes speech that has characteristics that would be missing from the NPR data, such as heavy regional accents.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#172

Post by drewrv »

GhostofDamore wrote: post #170

What will those rooting for Google to fire James Damore have to say now? I bet there is a significant overlap of those supporting her now with those rooting for Damore's firing. And Damore didn't make any demand, just a memo. I see many support her (from a justified? knee jerk reaction?) that being fired from a corporation for questioning it's bottom line is due to the power dynamics. The support to Timnit Gebru (pro…

Damore was an engineer whose continued employment would open the company up to a risk of lawsuit.

Gebru was an ethicist who was willing to resign over some deep concerns. Presumably ethical concerns.

We don't know much more about Gebru's situation, but they're different enough that it's not a useful comparison.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#173

Post by [deleted] »

alew1 wrote: post #119

The comments here are disheartening, essentially a combination of “It was Google’s right to fire her” and “She seemed ‘difficult.’” For an industry-operated “Ethics in AI” group to have any teeth, it can’t fire people when they do research that makes them look bad, or when members of the group are ‘difficult.’ (Multiple members of the team she managed have said that she was a great manager and this came as a total su…

[deleted]

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#174

Post by GhostofDamore »

drewrv wrote: post #172
GhostofDamore wrote: post #170

What will those rooting for Google to fire James Damore have to say now? I bet there is a significant overlap of those supporting her now with those rooting for Damore's firing. And Damore didn't make any demand, just a memo. I see many support her (from a justified? knee jerk reaction?) that being fired from a corporation for questioning it's bottom line is due to the power dynamics. The support to Timnit Gebru (pro…

Damore was an engineer whose continued employment would open the company up to a risk of lawsuit. Gebru was an ethicist who was willing to resign over some deep concerns. Presumably ethical concerns. We don't know much more about Gebru's situation, but they're different enough that it's not a useful comparison.

Both are Google Employees who got fired for rubbing their superiors in the wrong way.

> whose continued employment would open the company up to a risk of lawsuit

If protecting google from a lawsuit is your main concern, aren't you for firing her? The memo of James isn't as much a threat to bottom line or a lawsuit as unveiling some unethical practices (which she allegedly is up to due to her ethical concerns).

My point is precisely you can't have it both ways and be consistent.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#175

Post by throwaway-kmc »

lame-robot-hoax wrote: post #112
throwaway-kmc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a good summary: https://www.google.com/amp/s/syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yan... I think it’s clear Gebru was acting in bad faith and LeCunn was baffled and trying to deescalate. Gebru responds to each attempt to deescalate by a reply designed to further rile up Twitter, without actually talking to any of the points LeCunn makes. Virtually all of her replies are some variant of “you are wrong, but I won’t say w…

It seems like most of the other AI researchers, at least those mentioned in that summary, agreed with Gebru? So while Gebru may have been “acting in bad faith,” it seems that the consensus, at least as the article presents it, was that Yann was wrong.

Maybe you’ve noticed that almost everyone who thinks this was probably justified is using a throwaway, and everyone who is claiming it was unjustified is not. Only one group stands to lose their careers here.

The same is true of AI research Twitter.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#176

Post by drewrv »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #144
alew1 wrote: post #119

The comments here are disheartening, essentially a combination of “It was Google’s right to fire her” and “She seemed ‘difficult.’” For an industry-operated “Ethics in AI” group to have any teeth, it can’t fire people when they do research that makes them look bad, or when members of the group are ‘difficult.’ (Multiple members of the team she managed have said that she was a great manager and this came as a total su…

> " when members of the group are ‘difficult’ " Dunno where you've worked but people who are disruptive to team functioning can (and should!) be terminated. Nobody should have to put up with a hostile work environment.

Lots of people have jobs where they should be disruptive to other teams. Financial audits are disruptive to accounting. Legal can disrupt just about any team. HR can disrupt hiring decisions. Security disrupts my desire to move fast and break things.

That does not create a hostile work environment. It's healthy and normal. I would expect an ethicist to fall under a similar category.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#177

Post by stochastic_flow »

alew1 wrote: post #119

The comments here are disheartening, essentially a combination of “It was Google’s right to fire her” and “She seemed ‘difficult.’” For an industry-operated “Ethics in AI” group to have any teeth, it can’t fire people when they do research that makes them look bad, or when members of the group are ‘difficult.’ (Multiple members of the team she managed have said that she was a great manager and this came as a total su…

(1) If she was difficult with/for everyone then she would have been fired earlier. It makes sense for the people who liked her management style to be supportive and vocal about her, and those that were not happy to not say a thing. Especially in the cancel-culture that we now live in and the economic-uncertainty.

(2) I don't understand how someone can make public accusations without providing the full picture. Maybe she is legally constrained, but then she shouldn't have said anything and handle the whole situation legally first and then write what she wants to write about it. Google might be wrong here, but we definitely cannot see that.

P.S. It seems to me that the only person who handled "firing" professionally was the most ridiculously dressed person on the planet who goes by the pseudonym Dr. Disrespect. So much drama going on around nowadays.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#179

Post by renewiltord »

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…

There is a discussion to be had here but it's not possible in public because of the escalation of the topic. This is also not the best thread to be having it.

Since everyone else is just saying "you don't get it" without explaining what "it" is, I will provide some brief avenues of exploration. Because they are brief, they will be coarse and imperfect, and aiming to give you directional assistance on the topic.

So with that massive preamble because I'm not seeking to argue, here you go:

* Pre-trained models already encode much of this bias and if you don't use them you won't get very far very fast

* Large available datasets also reflect these biases

* AI model performance is generally measured against this dataset, further entrenching the bias. If you're better on Indian face generation it will give you barely any benefit on most scoring methods

* Saying "the outcome is only biased because the data is biased" misses the fact that the performance is on the biased data

There's a little more to it but I believe that's the meat of it. Anyway, not too keen on arguing this. Just sharing because it took me some work to figure out what they were talking about and I wish someone had explained it to me so doing so here.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#180

Post by [deleted] »

GhostofDamore wrote: post #170

What will those rooting for Google to fire James Damore have to say now? I bet there is a significant overlap of those supporting her now with those rooting for Damore's firing. And Damore didn't make any demand, just a memo. I see many support her (from a justified? knee jerk reaction?) that being fired from a corporation for questioning it's bottom line is due to the power dynamics. The support to Timnit Gebru (pro…

[deleted]
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