The letter, sent to CEO Sundar Pichai, is titled “The Future of Ethical AI at Google.” It sets out the moves that researchers want the company to make to “rebuild trust” with the team and create an environment in which they can continue their work. The team investigates the ethical repercussions of artificial intelligence and advises the company on AI policies and products.
It comes as a result of the sudden departure of Timnit Gebru, who until early December was the co-director of Google’s ethical AI team. She was also one of the few black workers in the company overall (3.7% of Google employees are black, according to the company’s 2020 annual diversity report), let alone in its division of IA. The research scientist is also a co-founder of the Black in AI group, which aims to increase the representation of black people in the field.
The letter’s demands include the removal of Google Vice President Megan Kacholia from the team’s management chain; for transparency around the exit of Gebru; and that Google’s head of AI, Jeff Dean, and Kacholia apologize for how Gebru was treated. It also calls on the company to offer Gebru a new top-level position, to publicly commit to the integrity of the research conducted at Google, and to ensure that it will not harm the workers who defended Gebru.
In a message sent to Pichai and other people related to the letter, Alex Hanna, a senior researcher on the Ethical AI team, said he was sent on behalf of his team. A source familiar with the team said it includes about a dozen members.
First reported by Bloomberg, CNN Business also obtained a copy of the letter and confirmed its authenticity. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Wednesday, December 2, Gebru
he tweeted who had been “fired immediately” by an email she recently sent to Google’s internal Brain Women and Allies mailing list. In the email, she expressed dismay at the company’s lack of diversity and frustration at an internal process related to the review of a research paper that has not yet been published, which she co-authored.
In
later tweets, Gebru clarified that no one from Google explicitly told her that she was fired. Rather, he said Google would not meet a number of his conditions for a return and accepted the waiver immediately because he considered his email to reflect “behavior inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.”
Gebru’s sudden departure quickly angered thousands of employees at the company and others in the tech and academic communities.
Google said on Wednesday (December 9th) that it would examine Gebru’s exit. In a note sent to Google (GOOG)Pichai wrote that the company needs to “assess the circumstances” that caused Gebru to leave Google last week and examine “where we could have improved and conducted a more respectful process.”
“We will begin a review of what happened to identify all the points where we can learn, taking into account from the de-escalation strategies to the new processes we can establish,” he wrote in a note that CNN Business has confirmed to be authentic. .
Gebru is known for her research on biases and inequalities in AI, and in particular for a 2018 article she co-authored that highlighted the malfunctioning of commercial facial recognition software when trying to classify women and girls. people of color. His work sparked a broad awareness of the common problems in AI today, especially when technology has the task of identifying anything about humans.
