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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

#71

Post by cauthon »

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-...

I’m not sure which Google AI paper you’re referencing. The recent paper at the center of the controversy did have actionable suggestions regarding model training costs (financial and environmental), appropriate training sets, and generally incorporating domain expertise to avoid misinformation or mistranslations. [1]

That’s fair, I haven’t visited LW in a while. I did thoroughly enjoy HPMOR, but thought that most of Eliezer’s other work fell closer to speculation than practice.

As other commenters have mentioned, these AI algorithms are already being implemented in the real world with real consequences. Their associated ethical concerns therefore seem more urgent, and they can be acted upon.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...

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

#72

Post by gonehome »

dragonwriter wrote: post #66
gonehome wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

> "publicly naming and blaming and specific employee"

They're not doing this if the press reaches out to them for comment with the specific details first. Given the bad faith actions of Gebru already (and apparently she's at least partially the source here from the other reply to your comment) it makes sense for Google to clarify with the response they gave (and in that response Google also did not mention the name of the employee).

This issue is way too heated for real productive discussion on internet forums. It's obviously tribal, flamewar bait, with a massive undercurrent of partisan politics (and perceived partisan politics on the side of the person you're disagreeing with).

I found what Gebru did earlier to be wrong, my prior is that the behavior here by the employee is also likely to be wrong. I've been generally disappointed in the level of discussion from the political fringes (both 'woke' and pretty much the entire GOP at this point). I find a lot of overlap between this Google AI ethicist community and critical race theory woke politics.

I suspect in the end when all the details are out Google will be in the right.

Without waiting there's no point for all the arguing that's going to go back and forth in these comments.

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

#73

Post by gonehome »

mikejb wrote: post #68
gonehome wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Thanks - I suspected as much.

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

#74

Post by pr_nik2 »

nostromo wrote: post #14
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…

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

I really have no problem with people being both subject-matter experts and activists. Chomsky is the prime example: world-class linguist and outspoken leftist intellectual. But the one mistake he never made was to try to established 'leftist linguistics'. Contemporary 'AI ethics' feels like leftist activism with a very superficial understanding of machine learning technologies. Versions of "ML researchers are white males, so their creations inherit their biases"[1] are objectively wrong. Biases exists, but they come from the human-annotated training data fed into ML systems and not the gender of the programmer.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial...

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

#75

Post by visarga »

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…

> people who bemoan that social scientists are activists

I'd prefer they label themselves as partizan ethicists or activists.

> , that they are not supposed to actually develop solutions to what they study

On the contrary, they should develop solutions, not just scandals. The problem is with activists who just want to criticize without contributing a solution. I suspect they are more interested in making a name for themselves and using ethics as a club.

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

#76

Post by dgellow »

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…

I read your links and I have to say that I do not understand how the list of excluded words relates to the rest. And what’s the issue here.

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

#77

Post by mikejb »

dragonwriter wrote: post #66
gonehome wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

> 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.

To give a counter-argument to this: If party A makes a claim or accusation, and party B just says "no comment for now", it'll be near-impossible to reduce the (potentially unjustified) fallout of the premature verdict made. Public opinions matter, and stories told one-sided should not be desired by anyone interested in an objective discourse.

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

#78

Post by dragonwriter »

gonehome wrote: post #72
dragonwriter wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wo…

> "publicly naming and blaming and specific employee" They're not doing this if the press reaches out to them for comment with the specific details first. Given the bad faith actions of Gebru already (and apparently she's at least partially the source here from the other reply to your comment) it makes sense for Google to clarify with the response they gave (and in that response Google also did not mention the name o…

> They’re not doing this if the press reaches out to them for comment with the specific details first.

The press didn’t have the specific details until given them by Google, which is the “naming and blaming”.

The press had a report from another party of an apparently nonfunctional corporate email address. Describing the existence and basis of an internal investigation that had not been completed from that is grossly unprofessional; I’d be mildly surprised if it was done by a small outfit where media inquiries were regularly fielded by someone with no corporate PR, HR, or legal training, advice, or guidance, but for anything at Google’s scale it is unimaginable as anything but a conscious, deliberate breach of norms with the intent of harming the subject employee in public without developing a full picture of the facts, and that’s assuming Google’s statement is completely truthful as far as it goes.

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

#79

Post by knorker »

Are all ethicists as unethical as these two?

I wonder if this one collected all those internal threads where Timnit was being toxic, that insiders kept describing.

No? I guess this ethicist thought it best to only exfiltrate things matching her narrative?

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

#80

Post by pr_nik2 »

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…

Yes, a fire brigade needs to put out the fire. The analog to that in the social realm are non-profits, democratic policies, and grassroots activism. But fire brigades would be really bad at putting out fires if we hadn't studied them scientifically since about the 17th century. We would not know the difference between electrical fires, fires involving oil, and bush fires. Today, woke academics declare some social 'fires' to be bad, others to be necessary, and some to be underrepresented, instead of asking what causes them. I doubt this will lead to a coherent and ultimately actionable understanding of reality.
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