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Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

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Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#61

Post by gonehome »

ALittleLight wrote: post #48
cauthon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was disappointed to find out that AI ethicists at Google aren't LessWrong style AI ethicists. I've just read one Google AI ethics paper in it's entirety but it seemed pretty non-insightful and not actionable. This seems like a contradictory criticism to make. The Less Wrong folk, in my perception, mostly dabble in thought experiments (such as Roko’s basilisk) that aren’t terribly relevant to real world AI work. T…

Gebru's (and co-author's) work on racial error in facial recognition was done while they were academics at Stanford and MIT respectively and not while a Google AI ethicist to my knowledge. Roko's Basilisk is a banned comment from Less Wrong (though interesting) and doesn't really represent the totality of that site or the associated ideas. https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-finds-gender-skin-type-bias-...

Yeah - the basilisk thing is mostly a joke as far as I can tell and has little to do with the AGI goal alignment friendly AI work or the control problem.

Miri is mostly focused on the AGI control problem and thinks that AGI is closer than others believe. If true, all other problems are pretty irrelevant.

There is real work in ML bias and fairness to be done too, but it seems overrun by toxic personalities and partisan politics.

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#63

Post by mikejb »

dragonwriter wrote: post #44
esja wrote: post #8

“In this instance, yesterday our systems detected that an account had exfiltrated thousands of files and shared them with multiple external accounts.” If true, that is damning, and would demonstrate once again that being an “ethics researcher” does not mean that you are are any more ethical than the average person. It just means you are more interested in the subject. As a side note, I wish this field was more intere…

> If true, that is damning Sure, and, if false, its also damning — in both cases, of Google management. Either: (1) They have received an early indication which may indicate either unauthorized or legally protected activity, and are publicly naming and blaming and specific employee before completing an investigation, which is merely grossly unprofessional and unethical though probably not actually illegal, or (2) The…

The (1) case is a bit inaccurate/misleading. From what I can gather from the article:

- Gebru tweeted the name of the employee [1]

- Axios then reached out to Google, who then made the following statement:

> Our security systems automatically lock an employee’s corporate account when they detect that the account is at risk of compromise due to credential problems or when an automated rule involving the handling of sensitive data has been triggered. In this instance, yesterday our systems detected that an account had exfiltrated thousands of files and shared them with multiple external accounts. We explained this to the employee earlier today.

Context matters.

[1] https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1351698317550432256

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#64

Post by ALittleLight »

unhammer wrote: post #52
ALittleLight wrote: post #3

I was disappointed to find out that AI ethicists at Google aren't LessWrong style AI ethicists. I've just read one Google AI ethics paper in it's entirety but it seemed pretty non-insightful and not actionable. That said, if Google is "investigating" her because she was trying to find evidence of discrimination or bad treatment of Dr. Gebru, that seems borderline criminal behavior. (Assuming her attempts at trying to…

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a... is a summary of the paper that started it, full of actionable points – and co-authored with Emily Bender, no less! Also, if you're into the LessWrong mindset and are susceptible to think that that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, you might find this tidbit interesting: > Buried in the recent trillion parameter language model paper is how th…

Could you elaborate on this a little more? I'm not sure I'm connecting all the dots.

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#65

Post by mikejb »

Barrin92 wrote: post #28
esja wrote: post #8

“In this instance, yesterday our systems detected that an account had exfiltrated thousands of files and shared them with multiple external accounts.” If true, that is damning, and would demonstrate once again that being an “ethics researcher” does not mean that you are are any more ethical than the average person. It just means you are more interested in the subject. As a side note, I wish this field was more intere…

>If true, that is damning it's not damning and not unethical, it's the definition of whistle-blowing.

Not every leak is a whistleblow. It depends on the content of the files. That verdict still needs to be made (depending on the content of the leaked files).

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#66

Post by dragonwriter »

gonehome wrote: post #55
dragonwriter wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If true, that is damning Sure, and, if false, its also damning — in both cases, of Google management. Either: (1) They have received an early indication which may indicate either unauthorized or legally protected activity, and are publicly naming and blaming and specific employee before completing an investigation, which is merely grossly unprofessional and unethical though probably not actually illegal, or (2) The…

Why do you think Google reached out to the press? I’d bet the employee leaking documents did, and Google just responded to a request for comment. It’s more the style of those players.

> Why do you think Google reached out to the press?

Why do you think I think that? I never said anything about who reached out to the press.

> I’d bet the employee leaking documents did

I bet they didn’t, because none of the articles include anything that the employee would have given them, only that they could not immediately be reached for comment. If that employee was the first source of information, then there would actually be some information from their perspective.

> and Google just responded to a request for comment.

The normal response (for a variety of good reasons, including legal and ethical ones) from a company on a matter like this when asked by the press when they haven’t completed an internal investigation would be to decline comment on personnel matters. Google’s behavior is grossly unethical here irrespective of who reached out to the media first.

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#67

Post by visarga »

NotPavlovsDog wrote: post #46
nostromo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the people in this field aren’t ethicists, they’re activists.

A large part of them believe that a researcher has to be an activist, i.e. research=activism. Many recent textbooks on social science see the following as credible resarch: "Emancipatory research: Research that exposes underlying ideologies in order to liberate those oppressed by them." (Zina O'Leary textbook, used by many schools, over 2K citations for multiple editions) So if a corporate behemoth such as Google wan…

It was clearly a mistake. They don't act in a constructive way.

Let's take Timnit's paper for example. She found out that Google had been using a biased language model in search. The bias was like - 'male' association with 'doctor' as opposed to 'woman' association to 'nurse'. But she didn't show how this is harming anyone in a concrete way. Just theoretical. And then she offered no solution, just blaming the work of others, using her paper as a soap box to raise scandal and make herself holier than thou.

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#68

Post by mikejb »

gonehome wrote: post #55
dragonwriter wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If true, that is damning Sure, and, if false, its also damning — in both cases, of Google management. Either: (1) They have received an early indication which may indicate either unauthorized or legally protected activity, and are publicly naming and blaming and specific employee before completing an investigation, which is merely grossly unprofessional and unethical though probably not actually illegal, or (2) The…

Why do you think Google reached out to the press? I’d bet the employee leaking documents did, and Google just responded to a request for comment. It’s more the style of those players.

The researcher who's departure sparked a lot of controversy tweeted the name of the employee in question, with some opinion attached. Axios reached out to Google who then made the statement saying security systems detected mass-forwarding of internal documents. They didn't name the employee, but prefaced the explanation with "in this instance".

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#69

Post by dragonwriter »

mikejb wrote: post #63
dragonwriter wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If true, that is damning Sure, and, if false, its also damning — in both cases, of Google management. Either: (1) They have received an early indication which may indicate either unauthorized or legally protected activity, and are publicly naming and blaming and specific employee before completing an investigation, which is merely grossly unprofessional and unethical though probably not actually illegal, or (2) The…

The (1) case is a bit inaccurate/misleading. From what I can gather from the article: - Gebru tweeted the name of the employee [1] - Axios then reached out to Google, who then made the following statement: > Our security systems automatically lock an employee’s corporate account when they detect that the account is at risk of compromise due to credential problems or when an automated rule involving the handling of se…

> The (1) case is a bit inaccurate/misleading.

No, its not.

> Gebru tweeted the name of the employee

Sure, more to the point Gebru tweeted that Mitchell’s corporate email appeared to be nonfunctional, sure.

> Axios then reached out to Google

That seems likely to be the sequence of events, sure.

Usually and ethically, a company that was in exactly the circumstances Google described would have:

(1) Declined comment, or

(2) Confirmed the email was nonfunctional and declined further comment, or

(3) Explicitly declined comment on personnel matters (especially if the framing of the question from Axios raised the issue of it being a disciplinary action of some kind; raising a personnel issue when it wasn’t part of the framing of the question would itself be somewhat unusual.)

> Context matters.

As an abstract truism, sure; while the narrative you describe is exactly what seems like the most likely scenario to me, I didn’t describe it because that fact was already considered in the description of scenario #1. Google’s behavior is (even assuming that they are being completely honest) grossly unethical in the context described.

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#70

Post by belorn »

hikingsimulator wrote: post #60
nostromo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the people in this field aren’t ethicists, they’re activists.

I hope they are. You would not want a fire brigade that's only theoretical about putting fires out. It seems that the occurrence of people who bemoan that social scientists are activists, that they are not supposed to actually develop solutions to what they study, has increased in recent years. It's bad logic. A sociologist studying the effects of poverty shouldn't be interested in solving poverty is a mind-boggling…

If you hired a researcher to find out the most effective strategies to putting out fires you might actually want a purely theoretical researcher. Advocates for air drops might be blind to firewalls and vise verse.

There is also a reason to be cautious if a sociologist studying the effects of poverty were basing their suggestions on what would fix their own poverty.

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