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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

#251

Post by lowercase1 »

describe24 wrote: post #244
lowercase1 wrote: post #227

Too many people expecting too perfect of behavior from someone apparently put it a shitty situation by much more powerful forces.

Nobody has set the bar that high. Many people are just expecting basic civility. We all have to deal with issues yet not everyone turns to being hostile at every beat. It's not a once off Tweet for her, I think more would be forgiving if that were the case

Half of the comments here are focused on the appropriateness of an email after things had already become beyond repair. It's way, way less important than Google potentially preventing publication of damaging research.

It's a bad sign from Google that this is their argument. If they were good on diversity/ethical ai they'd fight on that not on tone. If the facts are bad fight on tone, etc

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#252

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#253

Post by lowercase1 »

MaximumYComb wrote: post #242
lowercase1 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slandered, how? https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331757629996109824?s... seems to be the complaint. This seems plausible given her work to push towards less biased data/algorithms got squashed and she resigned.

The white men, where she used both their skin colour and gender in a derogatory manner, were accused of trying to shutdown minorities. I would be very surprised if those men did anything with an intent to squash minorities. They were most likely making business decisions to further Google's intent.

Email claims she was told to stop publishing a paper with basically zero reason/conversation matching the tweet.

Hiring has apparently failed to meet goals with zero consequences suggesting a lack of concern with minorities.

I don't think someone misinterpreting disregard for ethical ai research as disregard for minorities is slanderous, heck it might be charitable as the later is known.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#255

Post by berdario »

hintymad wrote: post #215
throwaway-kmc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a good summary: https://www.google.com/amp/s/syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yan... I think it’s clear Gebru was acting in bad faith and LeCunn was baffled and trying to deescalate. Gebru responds to each attempt to deescalate by a reply designed to further rile up Twitter, without actually talking to any of the points LeCunn makes. Virtually all of her replies are some variant of “you are wrong, but I won’t say w…

The discussion shows that Gebru is a racist to the bone because she viewed everything from the racism angle. LeCunn could be wrong by attributing bias to statistical bias in data, but how is it bigotry without evidence? Yet, oh no, LeCunn is a racist in Gebru's eyes, and in this strange American culture, Gebru could just call anyone or any opinion she didn't like racist or racism. I'd say she deserved to be fired for…

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

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#256

Post by jariel »

kenjackson wrote: post #236
visarga wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some third hand hearsay mention: > In the letter she criticised the use of pre trained language models in Google's products (e.g., BERT is now used for most searches, machine translation, etc.). Apparently, the two conditions she mentioned concern how Google goes forward in deploying these models despite the warning of (their own) AI ethics researchers about biases that are manifested in these models.

That seems like its not only reasonable, but what her job was. Now if she said, "Do this or I quit" then that is on her. But if she criticized them harshly then that seems completely appropriate.

"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 strongest bias, where are the concerns about that?

And how does bias imply a 'lack of ethics'?

The entire consideration is ridiculous:

1) AI is not special and odes not deserve it's own ethical oversight. Every social tech has issues and it all needs to be thought about.

2) Someone with no real training in the issue may very well merely be injecting their own politics into the situation, and possibly overstating issuses.

3) There's nothing objective about morality or ethnics, so it's really hard to even find such at thing as 'objective'.

What the company needs is a clean, comprehensive framework for the issue, and probably some independent oversight that can given them private assessments of where there are red flags.

Not individuals who want to make a name for themselves on the issue publicly, and who might be part of some kind of ideological movement.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#257

Post by berdario »

thu2111 wrote: post #129
busrf wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matthew Garrett, a senior security researcher at Google, is very critical about Google on his Twitter all the time. As he has pointed out, he's still very employed. https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1334382463498391557 Neither of us are on her team at Google. (I'm certainly not and I doubt you are.) We have no idea how easy it is to work with her. Certainly if I were working with an AI ethics researcher I would expect…

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 claims that are wrong and/or misleading

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#258

Post by kenjackson »

jariel wrote: post #256
kenjackson wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like its not only reasonable, but what her job was. Now if she said, "Do this or I quit" then that is on her. But if she criticized them harshly then that seems completely appropriate.

"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 those are the groups that are less likely to be able to stand for themselves and thus become the victims of the bias. A bias against corporate or powerful interests will likely be rectified relatively quickly.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#259

Post by hintymad »

berdario wrote: post #255
hintymad wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The discussion shows that Gebru is a racist to the bone because she viewed everything from the racism angle. LeCunn could be wrong by attributing bias to statistical bias in data, but how is it bigotry without evidence? Yet, oh no, LeCunn is a racist in Gebru's eyes, and in this strange American culture, Gebru could just call anyone or any opinion she didn't like racist or racism. I'd say she deserved to be fired for…

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.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#260

Post by anonvenger »

busrf wrote: post #92

Here's a tweet with more details about her conditions and how that ties in to her resignation: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334341991795142667 > Apparently my manager’s manager sent an email my direct reports saying she accepted my resignation. I hadn’t resigned—I had asked for simple conditions first and said I would respond when I’m back from vacation. But I guess she decided for me :) that’s the lawyer…

"Who do they hire to replace her?". That is an excellent question, and a good time to remember that Identity Politics != Ethics. Most big ethical questions in AI have nothing to do with race or gender, instead affect us all. Some say AI is an existential risk for Humanity at large.
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