Google employees protest firing of black scientist Timnit Gebru

More than 1,500 Google employees and some 2,000 members of academia, industry and civil society have signed a petition to protest the dismissal of Timnit Gebru, a black scientist and artificial intelligence ethicist who says she was fired by Google after expressing concerns about the company’s diversity protocols.

“We, the undersigned, stand in solidarity with Dr Timnit Gebru, who was finished from his position as scientific researcher and co-head of the ethical artificial intelligence (AI) team at Google, following an unprecedented research censorship, the petition reads. “We call on Google Research to strengthen its commitment to research integrity and to make an unequivocal commitment to supporting research that honors the commitments made in Principles of AI. “

In a series of tweets, Gebru said she was fired by the company on Wednesday after expressing frustration in an email sent to an internal group of women and allies working in the company’s artificial intelligence unit about Google’s shoddy diversity initiatives. The company, she wrote, fosters a culture of “zero responsibility,” a culture where there is no real motivation for company leaders to change hands.

“Your life gets worse when you start advocating for the underrepresented, you start to upset other leaders,” Gebru wrote in the email. “There is no way more documents or more conversations will end in anything.”

The dispute appears to stem from an incident in November in which a senior Google executive told Gebru that she should retract or remove her name from a post she co-wrote. According to Reuters, The paper concluded that tech companies were not doing enough to ensure that AI systems designed to copy human speech and writing patterns did not exacerbate historical gender biases and the use of a offensive language.

In an interview with Wired, Gebru said she had attempted to negotiate with Google, offering to remove her name from the newspaper in exchange for the company providing a full explanation of its objections and presenting a list of best practices for handling such incidents in the future.

“I felt like we were being censored and I thought that had implications for all ethical research on AI,” she said. Wired. “You’re not going to have papers that make the company happy all the time and that don’t point out issues. This is contrary to what it means to be that kind of researcher.

In a seemingly related Tweeter written a week before his departure, Gebru wrote: “Nothing like a group of privileged white men trying to crush research conducted by marginalized communities for marginalized communities by ordering them to STOP with a ZERO conversation. The lack of respect is incredible. “

After rejecting his compromise agreement, Google cut off access to Gebru’s emails and wrote to the artificial intelligence team to tell them that they had accepted his resignation. In this email, reviewed by Reuters, Jeff Dean, the head of Google’s AI unit, claimed that Gebru threatened to resign unless he was told which colleagues thought a draft document she had drafted was unpublishable. request that Dean rejected.

“We accept and respect his decision to quit Google,” Dean wrote in the email, adding, “We all genuinely share Timnit’s passion for making AI more equitable and inclusive.”

Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the Legal Defense and Educational Fund at the NAACP, wrote in a tweet that the decision to fire Gebru – the co-author of a major 2018 article that found higher error rates in technology facial analysis for women with dark skin and the co-founder of the non-profit association Black in AI– was “absolutely maddening” and “a disaster”.

The incident is the latest to land Google in hot water on its treatment of employees. On Wednesday – the same day Gebru claims to have been fired – the National Industrial Relations Council filed a complaint against Google, accusing the company of illegally monitoring, interrogating and ultimately firing several workers who had publicly protested against the policies of the company. company and tried to form a union.