đź’ Timnit Gebru Founder and Executive Director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR) at UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day Global Conference 2022.
💠Timnit Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is kn…
đź’ Timnit Gebru Founder and Executive Director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR) at UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day Global Conference 2022.
đź’ Timnit Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color, which means its use can end up discriminating against them. She also cofounded the Black in AI affinity group, and champions diversity in the tech industry. The team she helped build at Google is one of the most diverse in AI and includes many leading experts in their own right. Peers in the field envied it for producing critical work that often challenged mainstream AI practices.
A series of tweets, leaked emails, and media articles showed that Gebru’s exit was the culmination of a conflict over another paper she coauthored. Jeff Dean, the head of Google AI, told colleagues in an internal email (which he has since put online) that the paper “didn’t meet our bar for publication” and that Gebru had said she would resign unless Google met a number of conditions, which it was unwilling to meet. Gebru tweeted that she had asked to negotiate “a last date” for her employment after she got back from vacation. She was cut off from her corporate email account before her return.
Online, many other leaders in the field of AI ethics are arguing that the company pushed her out because of the inconvenient truths that she was uncovering about a core line of its research—and perhaps its bottom line. More than 1,400 Google staff members and 1,900 other supporters have also signed a letter of protest.
💠Another Firing Among Google’s A.I. Brain Trust, and More Discord
The researchers are considered a key to the company’s future. But they have had a hard time shaking infighting and controversy over a variety of issues.
Less than two years after Google dismissed two researchers who criticized the biases built into artificial intelligence systems, the company has fired a researcher who questioned a paper it published on the abilities of a specialized type of artificial intelligence used in making computer chips.
In December 2020, Google fired one of the leaders of its Ethical A.I. team, Timnit Gebru, after she criticized the company’s approach to minority hiring and pushed to publish a research paper that pointed out flaws in a new type of A.I. system for learning languages.
Before she was fired, Dr. Gebru was seeking permission to publish a research paper about how A.I.-based language systems, including technology built by Google, may end up using the biased and hateful language they learn from text in books and on websites. Dr. Gebru said she had grown exasperated over Google’s response to such complaints, including its refusal to publish the paper.
