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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

#221

Post by black_puppydog »

telltruth wrote: post #147
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…

In my opinion, she is being very unfair to a lot of her colleagues by not telling the whole truth and at the same time making very serious accusations. She sent email to large group of employees which violated some standards expected from a manager by Google. She is giving all the information except for what exactly she did. It's ironic that she is in "ethics business" but at the same time not realizing that it's une…

From what I understand, her access to said information (I assume you mean the content of the email she sent to the group) was cut off, so she wasn't actually in a position to (legally) share it any longer.

This seems to be it though, and I quoted some (I think) relevant parts of what she's criticizing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292266

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#222

Post by PeterStuer »

skywhopper wrote: post #209
PeterStuer wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must be a US specific thing as I do not see this in EU corporations. I assume there is also a 'Google Brain Men and Allies'? Why not just a 'Google Brain and Allies'? Or does that also exist?

The list is presumably a place to discuss issues that are specific to women’s experience working on Google Brain. “And allies” indicates it’s not exclusive, and other folks are welcome to contribute to the discussion. The reason there’s no “Google Brain Men and Allies” is because “men’s experience” is the default around which every other mailing list likely focuses.

Why would workplace mailing list focus by default on "men's experience" or "men's issues"? Wouldn't they just focus on work stuff, irrespective of the gender of the persons working there?

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#223

Post by jl2718 »

visarga wrote: post #158
jl2718 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any publications or results that show what she accomplished as a research scientist at google? What is considered the leading edge of the field of in AI ethics research? Had she accomplished something of great distinction in this field prior to google? Was her google street view result related to ethics? I would assume that ethics research would involve how an AI can learn to act ethically. Perhaps somethin…

She had a highly cited paper in 2018 about "Gender Shades", second author. The paper is about dataset bias and the creation of a small size benchmark for bias detection.

Okay; I see. I misunderstood her field of research under the ‘AI Ethics’ umbrella. She’s clearly a leader in the field of algorithmic fairness and social accountability, and this was her work prior to Google, so it seems her criticisms/activism would not have been completely divergent from expectations. It can’t be known without details, but, does it not look like a case of google getting exactly what they hired for?

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#224

Post by jcims »

drewrv wrote: post #176
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " 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.

Surely all of those exist on a spectrum from healthy to hostile. I've been in infosec for 25 years and see it regularly.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#225

Post by lowercase1 »

telltruth wrote: post #147
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…

In my opinion, she is being very unfair to a lot of her colleagues by not telling the whole truth and at the same time making very serious accusations. She sent email to large group of employees which violated some standards expected from a manager by Google. She is giving all the information except for what exactly she did. It's ironic that she is in "ethics business" but at the same time not realizing that it's une…

Based on the contents of the email things were already beyond repair

https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#226

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

black_puppydog wrote: post #214

This seems to be the email she sent to the internal "Women and Allies" mailing list: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a... The most relevant parts (in terms of back story) should be this: > A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meet…

Thanks for sharing this.

I'm just very confused now. What kind of "privileged and confidential document to HR" would be relevant to retracting a research paper? She has some very legitimate frustrations with the process here, but she doesn't seem to be disputing that the document was relevant. In a more normal context, my default assumption is that "privileged and confidential document to HR" means "someone's raised a serious issue and we'll be sued if we don't fix this", but I don't see how that fits here.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#228

Post by dang »

thisismyswamp wrote: post #217

Timnit conveniently lost access to the email that supposedly led to the firing. She previously sent her twitter mob out on LeCun for his stance on bias in machine learning models. I do not respect that kind of person and will not take a stance on this. I am disappointed that the twitter crowd doesn't care about the email, but not surprised. Just trying to keep in mind that the smart reasonable people tend to be silen…

(We moved this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25291559, where it was off topic, to here, where it is on topic.)

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#229

Post by free_rms »

renewiltord wrote: post #207
free_rms wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the additional detail, but those all still boil down to dataset eventually, right? Those sound more like "yes, and" additions than the "no, you're racist" shitfight we saw.

In the interest of explaining (not arguing), I believe the distinction is sort of that the community at large recognizes performance only on certain metrics. Let's set aside the notion of whether something or someone is "racist" because that's a bit charged. We'll instead just talk about whether we're creating generally capable systems. For instance, if I were to champion metric A which purports to measure performanc…

Wouldn't it be a lot more productive to lobby for inclusion of more samples into the performance measurement datasets than to get into super-combative twitter pissfights with people who aren't even opposed to that?

That's, like, not even culture war, it's just basic correctness of the reference datasets. If a fruit classifier was missing oranges, we'd just fix it and move on.

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