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A second Google A.I. researcher says the company fired her:
Two months after the jarring departure of a well-known artificial intelligence researcher at Google, a second A.I. researcher at the company said she was fired after criticizing the way it has treated employees who were working on ways to address bias and toxicity in its artificial intelligence systems.
Margaret Mitchell, known as Meg, who was one of the leaders of Google's Ethical A.I. team, sent a tweet on Friday afternoon saying merely: "I'm fired."
Google confirmed that her employment had been terminated. "After conducting a review of this manager's conduct, we confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct," read a statement from the company.
The statement went on to claim that Dr. Mitchell had violated the company's security policies by lifting confidential documents and private employee data from the Google network. The company said previously that Dr. Mitchell had tried to remove such files, the news site Axios reported last month.
[...] Dr. Mitchell's post on Twitter comes less than two months after Timnit Gebru, the other leader of the Ethical A.I. team at Google, said that she had been fired by the company after criticizing its approach to minority hiring as well as its approach to bias in A.I. In the wake of Dr. Gebru's departure from the company, Dr. Mitchell strongly and publicly criticized Google's stance on the matter.
[...] Google announced in a blog post yesterday that an executive at the company, Marian Croak, who is Black, will oversee a new group inside the company dedicated to responsible A.I.
Apart from the sanitized press statements, does anybody know why this is happening at Google?
Also at: Wired, WION Web Team, and Reuters
Margaret Mitchell's entries on Wikipedia and LinkedIn.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 21 2021, @11:50PM (1 child)
We went through the whole “I vas just obeyink orders” thing more than 70 years ago and decided it wasn’t an excuse for obeying Nazis and committing war crimes. But you’re okay with blind slavish obedience to wrong behaviour for a buck … be happy not everyone is, because the world needs people who try to do the right thing.
The subject is bias in AI. Google is covering up that their AI products is defective by firing those who try to push back. AI-backed bias has already ruined lives via Tatiana discrimination in hiring and wrong facial identification of minorities. Only a white supremist is okay with that.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @05:05AM
I don't think that anybody is making the case that abuses should be covered up. (I did actually look for that - couldn't find it.)
As it happens, there are already pretty robust laws in place about protecting people calling for safety reviews of various sorts. To my certain knowledge, both the FDA and OSHA have those protections in place, and I'm pretty sure the USDA does as well. If it's in the context of a union job, then there are similar protections in union labour law and so on.
But here's the kicker: they only apply to good faith actions on the part of the employee. They're not an automatic defence for people screaming about chemtrails and lizard aliens. They also aren't cover for industrial espionage, sabotage, or other malfeasance. In fact, they aren't even defences against someone being fired for not behaving according to reasonable standards - and respecting rules on information confidentiality is, absent a compelling reason (which an employment lawyer would be happy to follow up for big buck payouts) kind of a condition on which most employers would insist, with the backing of the courts.
So what we're hearing so far is: AI ethics researcher behaves in way that violates employment agreements, apparently touches on other people's private data, doesn't have a compelling reason that she's willing to share with the authorities, and gets fired. Well, whodathunkit? In fact, absent a very, very good explanation I'd be inclined to say that that sort of unethical behaviour is a disqualifying set of conduct for an ethicist.
Now you decide to bring up the whole war crimes thing - itself deeply troubling because they dressed up vengeance in a masquerade of legal process, with post facto "laws" and the jurisdiction defined by victory in the field. Granted that the nazis behaved abominably, putting together a gigantic, public kangaroo court didn't cover the victors with glory either. Nobody came out of that looking good; just some less terrible than others, by a dubious margin. It certainly doesn't make a positive case for anybody trying to establish an ethically pure situation here and now.
But applying the rules of the nazi-hunting trials to people performing good faith activities in the pursuit of lawful, gainful employment does seem like a real stretch, and neither this case nor the Timnit Gebru case seem to really rise to the level of anything plainly illegal, nor even particularly dubious. Timnit tried to play the not-resigning-threat game of chicken, and her bluff was called. Bummer. Now we have a case of misbehaviour in the service of no clear beneficial cause - result, firing. Bummeroonie.
But maybe you know something that we don't. What was the particular whistle that was going to be blown this time and why would it have exonerated anyone?