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A well-respected Google researcher said she was fired by the company after criticizing its approach to hiring minorities and the prejudices embedded in today’s artificial intelligence systems.
Timnit Gebru, who was co-head of Google’s artificial intelligence team, said in a Tweeter On Wednesday night, she was fired over an email she sent a day earlier to a group that included company employees.
In the email, reviewed by the New York Times, she expressed exasperation at Google’s response to the efforts she and other employees are making to increase minority hiring and bring attention to prejudice. in artificial intelligence.
“Your life starts to get worse when you start advocating for the underrepresented. You start to upset other leaders, ”the email read. “There is no way more documents or more conversations will end in anything.”
His departure from Google highlights growing tension between Google’s open workforce and its button-down senior management, while raising concerns about the company’s efforts to create fair and reliable technology. It can also act as a deterrent for black tech workers and researchers who have left academia in recent years for high-paying jobs in Silicon Valley.
“Her firing only indicates that scientists, activists and academics who want to work in this field – and are black women – are not welcome in Silicon Valley,” said Mutale Nkonde, a member of the Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab. “It’s very disappointing.”
A Google spokesperson declined to comment. In an email to Google employees, Jeff Dean, who oversees Google’s artificial intelligence work, including that of Dr Gebru and his team, called his departure a “difficult time, especially given the topics. major research projects in which she cared about responsible research in AI as an organization and as a business. “
After years of an all-in-one environment where employees engaged in open discussions in company-wide meetings and online message boards, Google has started cracking down on the talk about the workplace. Many Google employees bristled at the new restrictions and argued that the company had broken a tradition of transparency and open debate.
The National Labor Relations Council said on Wednesday that Google had most likely violated labor law by sacking two employees involved in organizing. The federal agency said Google illegally monitored employees before firing them.
Google’s battles with its employees, which in recent years have spoken out over the company’s handling of sexual harassment and its work with the Department of Defense and federal border agencies, have diminished its reputation as a utopia for tech workers with generous wages, benefits, and freedom to work. .
Like other tech companies, Google has also come under fire for not doing enough to address the lack of women and racial minorities in its ranks.
Racial inequality issues, particularly the mistreatment of black employees at tech companies, have plagued Silicon Valley for years. Coinbase, the most valuable cryptocurrency start-up, has seen an exodus of black workers over the past two years due to what workers have called racist and discriminatory treatment.
Researchers fear that people who build artificial intelligence systems will create their own biases in the technology. Over the past few years, several public experiments have shown that systems often interact differently with people of color – perhaps because they are under-represented among the developers who create these systems.
Dr Gebru, 37, was born and raised in Ethiopia. In 2018, while a researcher at Stanford University, she contributed to an article widely regarded as a turning point in efforts to identify and eliminate bias in artificial intelligence. She joined Google later that year and helped build the Ethical AI team.
After hiring researchers like Dr Gebru, Google introduced itself as a company dedicated to “ethical” AI. But he is often reluctant to publicly acknowledge the flaws in his own systems.
In an interview with The Times, Dr Gebru said her exasperation stemmed from the company’s handling of a research paper she wrote with six other researchers, including four at Google. The document, also reviewed by The Times, highlighted the flaws in a new generation of language technologies, including a system built by Google that underpins the company’s search engine.
These systems learn the vagaries of language by analyzing huge amounts of text, including thousands of books, Wikipedia entries, and other online documents. Because this text includes biased and sometimes hateful language, the technology can end up generating biased and hateful language.
After she and the other researchers submitted the article to an academic conference, Dr Gebru said, a Google official demanded that she remove the article from the conference or remove her name and names other Google employees. She declined to do so without further discussion and, in the email sent Tuesday evening, said she would resign after an appropriate amount of time if the company couldn’t explain why they wanted her to withdraw the document and respond. to other concerns.
The company responded to her email, she said, saying she could not respond to her requests and her resignation was accepted immediately. His access to company email and other services was immediately revoked.
In his note to employees, Dean said Google had respected “its decision to quit.” Mr Dean also said the paper did not recognize recent research showing ways to alleviate bias in such systems.
“It was dehumanizing,” said Dr Gebru. “They may have reasons to stop our research. But what is most upsetting is that they refuse to have a discussion about why.
Dr Gebru’s departure from Google comes at a time when artificial intelligence technology is playing a larger role in almost every aspect of Google’s business. The company has linked its future to artificial intelligence – whether with its voice-activated digital assistant or automated advertising placement for marketers – as a breakthrough technology to deliver the next generation of services and devices. smarter and more efficient.
Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, compared the advent of artificial intelligence to that of electricity or fire, and said it was essential for the future of business and IT. Earlier this year, Mr Pichai called for tighter regulation and responsible handling of artificial intelligence, arguing that the company must balance potential harm with new opportunities.
Google has repeatedly committed to eliminating bias in its systems. The problem, Dr Gebru said, is that most of the people who make the ultimate decisions are men. “Not only are they not prioritizing hiring more people from minority communities, they are crushing their voices,” she said.
Julien Cornebise, honorary associate professor at University College London and a former researcher at DeepMind, a leading AI lab owned by the same parent company as Google, was among many artificial intelligence researchers who said the departure Dr. Gebru’s reflected a larger problem in the industry. .
“It shows how some big tech companies only support ethics and fairness and other causes of AI for social good to the extent that their positive impact on public relations outweighs further scrutiny. that they bring, ”he said. “Timnit is a brilliant researcher. We need more like her in our field.
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