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We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

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Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#51
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is causing a reverse effect. It's going to create more racist behavior from employers - "If we cannot fire a PoC or some minority, let's not even bother hiring them in the first place." This is not good.

That is also, in fact, illegal. And it's not very hard to realize someone is doing that.

No one is questioning its legality. That's obvious and I agree, it is illegal.

There are a lot of things that are illegal but people do it anyways.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#52

I have a genuine question: If a person of color (I am myself non-white) is not performing, what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the race card on you? Are we creating a society that makes it impossible to fire a person of color? You know there are bad apples in every race, right? How do we handle such scenarios? Seems unfair to me, myself being a person of color - I don't want the world to t…

> what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the race card on you? A workplace that isn't hostile to people of color and evidence of the cause of dismissal

Should companies publicly present their side of the story for every firing?

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#53

Dr Gebru's research AFAICT shines a valuable light on some interesting ethical problems. Yet the response so far from Google and even HN has been one of censorship and suppression of Dr Gebru's free speech. How can we reconcile free speech and Google's right of review to her research?

Not sure the details of her employment arrangement, but usually work you do for your company belongs to the company and you don't have any right to freely publish it. Seems she was able to publish it anyway, so that's pretty good, isn't it? She's got more than the usual helping of free speech. Where's the censorship or suppression?

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#54
post #49

I did not read the paper (just like most people here), but by the title — “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” — it does not look like the CO2 emissions thing is the main topic of this research. BTW, "Stochastic Parrots" is a very descriptive name for the problem > Moreover, because the training datasets are so large, it’s hard to audit them to check for these embedded biases. “A me…

> Since these models are being applied in a lot of fields that directly affects the life of millions of people

In particular, it is being applied right now to rank Google search results, and probably responsible for lots and lots of Google's profit. You should be skeptical of Google's appraisal of the paper that is material to Google's profit.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#55
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m going to stand by my post even though AI ethics should be a genuine field. Call me cynical.

The Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA was a high-caliber event. The paper here, done at Google, a leading AI company isn't, and the ethics-washing on view here is deeply concerning.

That’s the crux of the problem. Top tier academia and ethics both attract the absolute best and the absolute worst. So I suppose we need both the critical cynicism and the optimists in threads like these.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#56
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering a Pennsylvania law maker made fake Twitter accounts to write "as a gay person", when you start saying you're a non PoC and conflating what happened with Timnit to "firing badly performing PoC"s you do not at all sound genuine. There is no way to prove you are actually PoC. And even if you did, it's incredibly unrelated to the matter at hand. No one has even claimed she was fired for bad performance and do…

She was fired after sending a mass email, to hundreds of colleagues, criticizing her employer in very strong terms. What company wouldn’t fire an exec who sends a “f * this place” email to the company mailing list?

Google, usually. People are highly critical of executives and (relevantly) Google's efforts on diversity and inclusion work all the time.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#57

Is this what esteemed PhD AI ethicists spend their time on? It sounds like a useless grad school paper. I think much less of everyone now.

The significance of their job is imagined at best, borderline academic welfare. Guess that is why Google can make the choice to remove her this quickly.

They lose nothing but face.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#58

I have a genuine question: If a person of color (I am myself non-white) is not performing, what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the race card on you? Are we creating a society that makes it impossible to fire a person of color? You know there are bad apples in every race, right? How do we handle such scenarios? Seems unfair to me, myself being a person of color - I don't want the world to t…

This is just your perception based on media speculation, not something actually backed up by numbers. Just because people on the internet are talking about race doesn't mean a firing has anything to do with race.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the race card on you? A workplace that isn't hostile to people of color and evidence of the cause of dismissal

Should companies publicly present their side of the story for every firing?

When they want to publicly claim credit for being a certain way but their actions point to another, it's up to them to clarify their position, and use whatever evidence to support their claim.
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