Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google
The comments here are disheartening, essentially a combination of “It was Google’s right to fire her” and “She seemed ‘difficult.’” For an industry-operated “Ethics in AI” group to have any teeth, it can’t fire people when they do research that makes them look bad, or when members of the group are ‘difficult.’ (Multiple members of the team she managed have said that she was a great manager and this came as a total surprise [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; so it’s also worth asking who she was causing difficulties for... and whether it was her, or just her research.) Google can’t have it both ways: it can’t credibly claim to be home to meaningful research about AI ethics, but not provide the tenure-like academic freedom protections that enable researchers in universities to discover and publicize results without regard for whether they paint a company’s products or direction in a bad light.[1] https://twitter.com/negar_rz/status/1334369747241218050
[2] https://twitter.com/dylnbkr/status/1334395186705702913
[3] https://twitter.com/L_badikho/status/1334393782310227970
[4] https://twitter.com/alexhanna/status/1334348137616568321
[5] https://twitter.com/dylnbkr/status/1334372430437994500