Google employees express anger over 'sacking' of Timnit Gebru
AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru says she was fired, but Google insists she left voluntarily
More than 2,000 Google employees have signed an open letter in support of leading artificial intelligence ethics researcher Timnit Gebru. A row has erupted after Gebru stated Google fired her for sending an internal email that accused the company of "silencing marginalised voices".
The letter in support of Gebru was published on the Google Walkout Medium account on Monday. It has already been signed by 2,060 Googlers and 2,658 academic, industry and civil society supporters.
The letter calls Gebru's sacking "unprecedented research censorship" and criticises the company for racism and defensiveness.
Many computer scientists in AI have also started to refuse reviewing Google AI research papers until the company changes its stance on the sacking.
"I'm listing http://google.com as a conflicted domain for paper reviews," Isaac Tamblyn, an AI researcher, stated on Twitter.
"If you aren't going to follow academic norms, I'm not going to peer-review your org's publications (which we all do for free)," he added.
Google denies Gebru's account of events. The company's head of artificial intelligence, Jeff Dean, told employees last week that Gebru had resigned from her job.
Dr Gebru is the co-founder of the Black in AI group, which promotes PoC employment and leadership in the field. She is known for her work on racial bias in technology and has criticised facial recognition systems that fail to identify black faces.
More recently, Gebru had been working on a paper that examined threats posed by computer systems that can analyse human language databases and use them to create their own human-like text. She argues that such systems will over-rely on data from rich countries, where people have better access to internet facilities.
"The result is that AI-generated language will be homogenised, reflecting the practices of the richest countries and communities," wrote MIT Technology Review.
As per media reports, Gebru's paper also mentions Google's own technology, which the company is using in its search business, as well as those developed by other tech firms.
According to the Verge, Gebru was planning to present the paper she co-authored at a computer science conference in March. She submitted it for internal review at the company on 7th October, but the company rejected it the next day.
In a statement issued last week, Dean said that Gebru's paper was submitted just a day before the deadline, while the company's research and review process requires two weeks to approve a paper.
Dean reportedly told employees that Gebru's paper "ignored too much relevant research."
However, Gebru's team rejected Dean's argument, arguing that nearly half of all papers are submitted with a day or less notice.
"It is clear that this is a standard which was applied unevenly and discriminatorily," they said in the letter.
Google employees are now demanding the company show transparency and explain the process by which Dr Gebru's paper was unilaterally rejected by leadership.
"This has become a matter of public concern, and there needs to be public accountability to ensure any trust in Google Research going forward," they wrote.
"We demand that Google Research make an unequivocal commitment to research integrity and academic freedom, drastically strengthening the commitments made in Google's Research Philosophy, and commit to supporting research that furthers the goals of Google's AI Principles by providing clear guidelines on how research will be reviewed and how research integrity will be respected."