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Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

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Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#81

Post by ggm »

johncena33 wrote: post #71
madamelic wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you fire your "Ethical AI" team lead for disagreeing with you... maybe you are only interested in the appearance of being ethical. Just a thought.

Clear violation of company policy is not disagreement. The entitlement of people never ceases to amaze me.

I would agree, when you consciously step over the legal, you accepted the coming dismissal. Entitlement is a label. I think she knows cause exists. She "left" long before and her anger reflects the construction of events which led there. I doubt she really feels entitled, beyond the expectations of respect and recognition somebody in her pay grades would normally expect.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#82

Post by ALittleLight »

andyxor wrote: post #77
ALittleLight wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked with many women at FANG companies and I wouldn't describe any of them as even somewhat motherly (though I have noticed "firm"). I think Dr. Gebru was fired because she cast Google in a bad light with some rather dubious arguments in a paper she wanted to publish and when she was asked to not publish her research she she sent an unprofessional email to a wide audience. I don't know why this person was fire…

Gebru wasn't fired because she "cast Google in a bad light", she gave an ultimatum to her boss threatening to resign if they don't disclose names of all reviewers who criticized her work AND blasted group emails calling for sabotage https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQ... https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t...

Her research does cast Google in a bad light. She writes about how language models (like Google's BERT which influences somewhere between 10% and 100% of searches) are environmentally unfriendly and encode hegemonic language making them subtly racist and sexist. Her solutions are to use smaller language models and more curated data sets, which are probably not palatable for Google.

Dr. Gebru was told the paper shouldn't be published with Google's name and some of the feedback on it that she received had to do with the paper not mentioning how Google was combating or leading on the problems with language models that she called out. In other words, if her paper had made Google look good, they probably would've been okay with her publishing it. Given that her paper made Google look bad, they wanted her to change it or not publish it. When she got that feedback she sent her intemperate email (in which she included her ultimatum to resign) and was terminated shortly after.

I think it's debatable, given that she did offer an ultimatum, whether she was fired or resigned - but I know she prefers the former and I think that's at least a coherent way to describe what happened (Google accepted one side of her ultimatum by firing her).

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#83

Post by Udik »

minimaxir wrote: post #60
benlumen wrote: post #48

I'm not interested in the details of this, but from a distance - people sure do make life difficult for themselves, bringing politics and their opinions and controversy into workplaces. It's always tech and academia, too - you'd think it'd be enough to get just paid shitloads of money for interesting knowledge work and save the drama for friends in the pub (or the bar, or whatever).

It's impossible to work on the ethics of AI without involving politics.

I think it's perfectly possible. The issue here is that we've been confusing activists for ethicists for some time.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#84

Post by maximente »

ggm wrote: post #67
katbyte wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is disagreeing with your employer and then flagrantly breaking rules and confidentiality and comparing the two like you are doing here is disingenuous.

No, its not disingenuous. It has to be thought about, sure. I think by the time you're archiving company secrets outside the firewall you mentally left some time ago. What led you there? Is that maybe the interest for me? I don't think she wound up there for entirely base reasons, maybe that's what I'm thinking. Most strict legal compliance answers aren't "wrong" but boy, they feel limited. Hard to change things when…

i feel you generally on this issue, but that last question is easy to answer. a lot of these aren't out of the goodness of our hearts type things but are more CYA if needed, kind of like white collar crime training. "well, we did the best we could - we even had an ethical AI team." also is a nice recruiting bullet.

now, we don't know if this joint was one of those "haha, yeah, we'll get back to ya" things in management's eyes from the start, but it sure looked like its leadership either was not informed or intended to make it actually matter. praise ought to be given there, as this industry seems largely morally bankrupt. however - and i'm not intending to be super negative here - she may have known that her and G weren't gonna work out, and this was just the most spectacular way to set sail.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#90

Post by bpodgursky »

> Mitchell has been locked out of the corporate email since last month after what a source says was her effort to search corporate correspondence for evidence to back up Gebru's claim of discrimination and harassment

It sounds like she dredged through her email, and sent emails she found to an ex-employee. That's probably going to get you fired.

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