Who Gets a Say in Our Dystopian Tech Future?
A.I. research scientist Timnit Gebru raised red flags about Google’s most exciting new tech. She says she was forced out for it.
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Timnit Gebru speaking at an industry event
Last Wednesday, Timnit Gebru, a staff research scientist and co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence team at Google, said that she had been ousted from the company over a research paper she co-authored and submitted for review. According to Gebru’s account, a manager had asked her to recant or remove her name from the paper, which raised ethical concerns about A.I. language models of the sort used in Google’s sprawling search engine. Gebru, one of the most prominent ethicists in Silicon Valley and one of Google’s few Black women in a leadership position, responded by asking for transparency about the review, offering that she would remove her name from the paper if the company gave her a fuller understanding of the process and developed a road map for researchers to follow for future reviews. If they couldn’t agree to those conditions, she said, she would leave the company at a later date. Google saw that as an invitation. They swiftly accepted what they called her resignation.