Google has fired another artificial intelligence researcher, Margaret Mitchell, in the company’s latest escalation of internal tensions since December controversial expulsion by Timnit Gebru, a black AI ethicist. As if the public relations fire with Google’s AI ethics team no longer had enough fuel.
Mitchell, who previously led the team alongside Gebru, was caught using automated scripts to comb the emails of his work to find evidence of discrimination and harassment to support Gebru’s claims, Inform Axios. In January, it lost access to its corporate email after Google launched an investigation into its business. In a statement a ReutersGoogle claims that Mitchell’s office followed the disciplinary recommendations of the investigators and a review committee. Google said it violated the company’s code of conduct and security policies and transferred electronic files outside the company.
Mitchell announced his resignation Friday evening in a tweet. When contacted for feedback CNN as for Google’s claims, he told the media, “I don’t really know these allegations. I mean most of this is news to me.”
She joined the company in 2016 as a senior researcher and founded Google’s AI ethics team with Gebru. In recent months, Mitchell has been openly critical of Google’s sudden dismissal of Gebru, one of the company’s few black employees (only 3.7% of Google’s U.S. staff is black according to his 2020 Annual Diversity Report). Gebru claims she was fired after worrying about the company’s poor quality diversity protocols and her attempt to do so. censor research critical with their products.
Gebru’s dismissal “created a domino effect of trauma for me and the rest of the team, and I think we’re being increasingly punished for that trauma,” Mitchell wrote. on Twitter Friday. Another leading AI researcher at the company, Alex Hanna, has tweeted a screenshot that night, presumably, from an email he received from an adult with the threat that it would be next to the court cut.
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Thousands of Google employees and AI community experts protested Google’s decision to fire Gebru, which led to greater scrutiny over the company’s AI ethics research. It now appears that internal tensions have begun to boil as Google tries to trick dissidents and quickly turn the page on the controversy by burying it in a flood of policy changes. Earlier this week, Google announced its plans restructure their responsible AI teams consolidating the leadership of Marian Croak, Google’s vice president of engineering. Hours before Mitchell’s dismissal, it was reported that Google sent an internal email detailing other new changes to the diversity and research policy the company was implementing as a result of an internal investigation into Gebru’s termination.