Google AI scholar’s exit sparks concerns

Artificial intelligence scholar Timnit Gebru helped improve Google’s image as a company that elevates Black computer scientists and questions harmful uses of AI technology.

But internally, Gebru, a leader in the field of AI ethics, was not shy about voicing doubts about those commitments — until she was pushed out of the company last week in a dispute over a research paper examining the societal dangers of an emerging branch of AI.

Gebru tweeted that she was fired. Google told employees she resigned. More than 1,200 Google workers have signed an open letter calling the incident “unprecedented research censorship” and faulting the company for racism and defensiveness.

The furor is the latest incident raising questions about whether Google has strayed so far away from its original “Don’t Be Evil” motto that the company now routinely ousts employees who dare to challenge management. The exit of Gebru, who is Black, also raised further doubts about diversity and inclusion at a company where Black women account for just 1.6% of the workforce.

And it’s exposed concerns beyond Google about whether showy efforts at ethical AI — ranging from a White House executive order this week to ethics review teams set up throughout the tech industry — are of little use when their conclusions might threaten profits or national interests.

Gebru has been a star in the AI ethics world who spent her early tech career working on Apple products and got her doctorate studying computer vision at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Gebru had been working on a paper examining the risks of developing computer systems that analyze huge databases of human language and use that to create humanlike text. The paper, a copy of which was shown to the Associated Press, mentions Google’s own new technology, as well as those developed by others.

Besides flagging the potential dangers of bias, the paper also cited the environmental cost of chugging so much energy to run the models — an important issue at a company that brags about its commitment to being carbon neutral since 2007 as it strives to become even greener.

Google managers had concerns about omissions in the work and its timing and wanted the names of employees taken off the study, but Gebru objected, according to an exchange of emails first published by Platformer.