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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

#271

Post by jariel »

kenjackson wrote: post #258
jariel wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That seems like its not only reasonable" Is it though? There is bias in everything. There is bias in Googles original search - it crawled content. That content will be biased. Google search has been biased since the start . It has nothing to do with AI. Biased is also contextual: what does it mean for all of us non-Americans to see tons of American content in everything - the 'American bias' is overwhelmingly the st…

There is bias in everything -- that is why you need ethics. You need to determine which biases are problematic and which aren't. If Google search favored Chinese government results in the US you'd probably say, "that seems biased in a bad way". Your disagreement seems less to do with that and more to do that you disagree with where her ethics rest. I think the reason why she pushes for marginalized groups is that tho…

Yes - the bias can be worse for marginalized groups and that's a legit issue for sure.

But hiring activists, and particularly those with a focus on a very specific technology ... I think is a double-wrong.

'Ethics' is all encompassing, every company has to deal with it ... it needs probably specialization and some cold calculating.

If there were some gigantic loophole whereupon marginalized people were truly thrown under the bus here, then maybe there's a case, but I seriously doubt that.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#272

Post by m4x »

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…

It's worth also quoting the most relevant parts of the email from Jeff Dean explaining Google's side:

> Timnit co-authored a paper with four fellow Googlers as well as some external collaborators that needed to go through our review process (as is the case with all externally submitted papers). We’ve approved dozens of papers that Timnit and/or the other Googlers have authored and then published, but as you know, papers often require changes during the internal review process (or are even deemed unsuitable for submission). Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted.

> A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies. Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues. We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper.

> Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#273

Post by [deleted] »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #267

Wired has an informative article about this. https://www.wired.com/story/prominent-ai-ethics-researcher-s... Have to say that being asked to retract a paper because her manager didn't like what she had to say sounds pretty objectionable to me. Academic researchers thinking about joining Google beware.

[deleted]

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#274

Post by raxxorrax »

throw1232020 wrote: post #198
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…

As somebody who has been involved in various diversity efforts for years, I'm honestly not that upset about all of this. There are real problems associated with discrimination in the US, for example in the criminal justice system. Likewise, there is discrimination in less high-stakes areas like tech. However, the main problem with Timnit and her colleagues is that they come into every situation assuming racism even w…

I think this mindset is especially toxic when people have access to data accumulated by Google, nor would I trust them to handle user data in confidence. This is not a small problem.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#275

Post by thu2111 »

berdario wrote: post #257
thu2111 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google historically tolerates generic criticism of the firm or its actions. Gebru routinely makes slanderous and offensive allegations against specific individuals, not Google as a whole. That said, Garrett makes clear his ideological sympathies on Twitter. Undoubtably comments like this one don't endear him to his management chain: When @computerfemme was fired, the VP of security at Google Cloud sent out an email t…

> The woman in question was fired from the security team for violating IT security policies: in her words, "All I did was make a popup to share the labor notice Google has to share with its workers", something that Google seems to have recurrent problems with staff doing. In other words she was rewriting the contents of web pages to meet her own political objectives. This paragraph that you just wrote is one of those…

How? That quote comes from the person who was fired. She explained what she did because she's proud of it: she injected some code into a web page about unions and organising telling Googlers they had a right to organise.

The Google security team is frankly deeply worrying at this point, and I say that as someone who used to work there on security related topics (but consumer account security, not internal). A small number of them have privileged access to mandatory Chrome extensions that are used for various security objectives, yet they seem to have no qualms about abusing them to advance their own political agendas. Moreover they don't recognise that this is a problem.

Controlling Chrome extensions that can inject JS into arbitrary websites equals root at google.com because everything they do is admin'd via web UIs.

What if you're a law firm who advises companies faced with union action? Is it safe for you to use GSuite or whatever it's called today? My guess is no, because the people who ultimately control Google's IT infrastructure are (a) willing to break the most basic of IT security rules and then boast about it publicly, and (b) many of them are politically extreme by the standards of most of the world.

Most astoundingly of all, I don't believe this is the first time Google has fired people for injecting JS into websites using internal security mechanisms to advance political agendas. In any normal company there'd be a mile of controls, processes and guard dogs surrounding any mechanism that could do this by now as it's been abused before. Apparently Google Security do not have their act together on this.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#276

Post by berdario »

hintymad wrote: post #259
berdario wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racism is discrimination based on race (from a position of power) Whom did Gebru discriminate against, based on their race? No one. That episode is unfortunate imho, but she only suspected racist rationales... Calling out racism does not make you a racist, just like calling something "fishy" does not make you grow fins and gills

Calling out racism does not make one a racist, for sure. Labeling anyone who disagrees with her a racist, without even a slightly plausible evidence, makes her a racist because all she can see is race. You're right that that's not the standard definition of racism. It's a fair game, though, as people like Gebru pretty much uses racism as a weapon however they like.

> Labeling anyone who disagrees with her a racist

Which she doesn't.

Most notably, people here have been raising concern about the discussion with Yann Lecun, but that was also just a civil, if tense, discussion.

You're better off not twisting the meaning of words to favor your argument, though. It'll just create more problems down the line

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#277

Post by berdario »

thu2111 wrote: post #275
berdario wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The woman in question was fired from the security team for violating IT security policies: in her words, "All I did was make a popup to share the labor notice Google has to share with its workers", something that Google seems to have recurrent problems with staff doing. In other words she was rewriting the contents of web pages to meet her own political objectives. This paragraph that you just wrote is one of those…

How? That quote comes from the person who was fired. She explained what she did because she's proud of it: she injected some code into a web page about unions and organising telling Googlers they had a right to organise. The Google security team is frankly deeply worrying at this point, and I say that as someone who used to work there on security related topics (but consumer account security, not internal). A small n…

> "All I did was make a popup to share the labor notice Google has to share with its workers"

Does not mean rewriting the content of webpages, or having "root at google.com". It's better if you'd stop such speculation.

The reality is much more pedestrian than what you describe: the person that was retaliated against only wrote simple, inert, strings of plain text.

That text was not injected anywhere, and there was no arbitrary code involved.

In fact, everything was safe, and went through the usual security controls.

The only "danger" in having that, is that people can read it.

Ultimately, it's laughable how you think that informing other coworkers about the NLRB is some kind of politically extreme agenda. It's clear that you have an axe to grind

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#279

Post by eyevpoison »

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…

https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a... Not sure how genuine this email is, but its all we have

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#280

Post by joijoiwejrr »

pinewurst wrote: post #266
joijoiwejrr wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Latinx employees Is there an affinity group for the overwhelming majority of "Latinx" people who don't use or like this term?

https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...

Exactly.
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