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More than 1,200 Google workers condemn firing of AI scientist Timnit Gebru

129 points by soylentbeige 6y ago

chippy 6y ago
This article is from a couple of days ago. The story the article is about has been posted to HN several times and I think that there are may be some relevant updates to the story since this article was published if you wish to dive in: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=false&query=Timnit%20Gebru&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...
commandlinefan 6y ago
But how many applaud it? (In secret because supporting this is something you might get fired for...)
- pmyteh 6y ago
  You might get fired for... supporting your bosses' decision to fire someone?
  - freshhawk 6y ago
    Some people have a stance they chose, that this is some Daily Mail "political correctness gone mad" thing, because SJW cultural domination controls all our lives. They're working through some cognitive dissonance.
    - adnzzzzZ 6y ago
      It does though. For instance, were any articles framed as [More than X Google workers condemn firing of James Damore], despite that actually being the case? The media, universities and other elite institutions always support the "SJW cultural domination" stance on all these issues and the discussion is always framed from that perspective. You'll find similar framings such as [More than X GitHub workers condemn GitHub's deals with ICE]. You'll never find [More than X GitHub workers condemn removal of meritocracy rug], despite that also being the case. You may not like me pointing this out, but that's how it happens. It's not cognitive dissonance to see that that's how these things go.
      - pmoriarty 6y ago
        "You'll never find [More than X GitHub workers condemn removal of meritocracy rug], despite that also being the case" How would you know it's the case unless, say, 1200 GitHub workers sign a letter of protest as they did in the case of Google? Sure, we could imagine that 1200 GitHub employees objected, but that's not the same thing, is it?
        pault 6y ago
        People are afraid of being labeled a bigot and having their careers ruined because they have a nuanced opinion about an issue related to identity politics.
      - freshhawk 6y ago
        The cognitive dissonance is that a huge number of highly respected people in the field, and coworkers, said "yeah, this was racist bullshit", and the actual paper in question has been seen by a lot of people by now. But if you are committed to the stance that racism doesn't exist and this is all a grand SJW conspiracy then you have to grasp at straws to ignore the overwhelming number of experts disagreeing with you.
        adnzzzzZ 6y ago
        I don't believe in experts. They have no power to change my mind about any social issue whatsoever. So them saying "this is racist" means nothing to me. There is no cognitive dissonance. You're projecting it into me because you think I think like you, that I care about what experts have to say, when I don't.
        freshhawk 6y ago
        It was a technical question about the predictive power of language models, the biases encoded in them and the results of their use in a large system like all of Google's connected products. But I guess to your particular faith-based ideology the mention of race makes it a "social issue"? Anyway I'm sorry I misclassified you and in the process insulted your religious beliefs. That wasn't my intention.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      Gebru and her supporters say that she was fired in part because she's a black woman and the racist Google culture rejected her. If they don't want others to frame it as a "political correctness gone mad" thing, they should drop the race baiting.
    - claudiawerner 6y ago
      Exactly. Someone reading the headline and not knowing that Timnit was an empoyee of Google would just read the headline into their confirmation bias.
  - dx87 6y ago
    More like, you support the decision, but your immediate boss doesn't, so they start looking for reasons to get rid of you that don't have any official connection to your stance. I remember a while back seeing leaked documents from Google where some managers shared an unofficial blacklist of employees to never promote and try to get rid of because of their political views.
    - tehwebguy 6y ago
      Every non-union employee in every state other than Montana has this potential problem. The difference is in smaller companies the unspoken rules are often spoken out loud and the employees don’t make Google money.
      - dschuler 6y ago
        How does Montana deal with that problem differently?
    - chinesempire 6y ago
      Is that true? Why do people call it "the land of the free" then?
    - eat_veggies 6y ago
      Why are we conjuring hypothetical situations in which you are oppressed, instead of condemning the concrete case where Jeff Dean looked for flimsy reasons to get rid of Timnit Gebru?
      - dontblink 6y ago
        CA is an at will state. He can fire her for no reason if he wishes, let alone a "flimsy" one.
      - vacheron 6y ago
        How is this a flimsy reason? Trying to paint this decision as an example of oppression is either ignorant or dishonest. Her actions would have gotten almost anyone fired from any company. If the accounts from ex/current-Googlers are true about her being difficult to work with and creating an uncomfortable work environment I would have expected Timnit to have been terminated long ago.
  - j4yav 6y ago
    There is a strange thing in modern discourse where there is an advantage in first establishing yourself as a victim before making your point.
- chinesempire 6y ago
  Can you really get fired for disagreeing with something?
- cataphract 6y ago
  Judging from the comments from some of her ex-colleagues, she was not exactly an easy person to deal with: > The GPT-3 thread you describe was my first exposure to Timnit. Watching that thread unfold left me feeling upset, frustrated, and disappointed. > I was so excited in anticipation of other Googler's reactions and insights about GPT-3, but that thread got immediately derailed by Timnit into claims of racism, not being listened to, dehumanization, that the whole forum became icy and dead after that. https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_timnit_gebru_and_google_megathread/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t...
  - whynotminot 6y ago
    I'm still trying to gather more insight into what actually happened here. But you have to know upper management calculated there'd be blowback for firing someone of her stature, position, background, race, gender, etc. They did it anyway. That to me says that keeping her around was worse than the storm they knew they'd generate by firing her.
    - vacheron 6y ago
      It's a bit ridiculous to me that the current climate necessitates that people of particular backgrounds are more or less convenient to fire.
paperdropper 6y ago
A draft copy of the disputed paper was posted over in Reddit, if this is of interest to anyone: https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_timnit_gebru_and_google_megathread/gepcliq https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t... https://gofile.io/d/WfcxoF https://gofile.io/d/WfcxoF
- muglug 6y ago
  Whether or not I agree with the conclusions, that’s exactly the sort of paper one might expect to be written by someone whose job title includes the words “ethics” and “AI”. I’m not sure what Google expected.
  - paperdropper 6y ago
    The other curious thing is, behind the pink-boxed redactions are the names of four other Google employees. I'm wondering why they haven't been reprimanded in the same way. At least, not that we know of.
    - bitcharmer 6y ago
      Maybe unlike the hero of the story they refrained from making racist, misandric remarks about their bosses on Twitter?
    - that_guy_iain 6y ago
      Well, she wasn't reprimanded for writing the paper nor for publishing it. In fact, she wasn't even reprimanded as far as I know for telling other employees to stop working on DEI. She told them she wanted confidental information or she will quit on a date she would like. They said they would not give her that information and that she is no longer welcome at the company. This isn't really reprimanding or even a normal firing. If I tell my boss do X or I quit and they say "Thanks for your work, we accept your resigination and the legal notice period applies." Fair play.
      - paperdropper 6y ago
IshKebab 6y ago
I thought she offered her resignation and they accepted?
- geofft 6y ago
  She offered to resign on a particular schedule to work out things with her team if they insisted on retracting the paper. They terminated her employment immediately, while she was on vacation, because of an email she sent to the ERG about it, and they didn't even inform her direct manager. Whatever they accepted, it wasn't the resignation she offered. (And even if they had done so, I expect the folks here to remain unhappy about the circumstances that lead up to her offering her resignation. It's not a thing you do if things are going well.)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - miked85 6y ago
    > She offered to resign on a particular schedule It is not out of the ordinary at all for companies to walk people out on the day of resignation. The company is not required or even expected to abide by whatever schedule is presented to them.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      If the employee says "I'm giving you 1 month formal notice of resignation", and the company responds with "effective immediately you are terminated without pay or benefits", at that point it's not a resignation any more, it's a termination. In most countries (which are not "at will"), I believe if the employee had not breached their contract they could claim wrongful termination in this scenario and likely be awarded the pay they would have received for the missing notice period. This doesn't mean the company is obliged to keep the employee on premises, on the network, active etc. It is not uncommon to ask the employee to leave the premises, have security walk them out, disconnect from the network etc out of security/IP/morale/whatever concerns. But they would still be either technically employed and paid while the notice worked out or paid in lieu of notice.
throwaway_45 6y ago
Google has close to a 100k employees. I wonder how the other 99% feel. This is America no one is stopping her from starting the next google and crushing google. This reminds of the Chappelle skit when keeping it real goes wrong. She published a paper without getting it reviewed talking shit about google. I am sure she was generously compensated. If she wants to talk shit about google she should probably do it when she doesn't work there.
- lagadu 6y ago
  Why would she not work there, no company is perfect. Plus working there provides her with a particularly good insight when it comes to criticizing Google. This is why so many of us look down on the US and their ease of firing people that don't buy into the groupthink.
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    This is not an example of "firing people that don't buy into the groupthink." She gave an ultimatum: either doxx the people who said her paper was unfit, or she quits. Google didn't give into her demands so accepted her resignation and moved her end date up because of her browbeating.
    - geofft 6y ago
      Wanting to know which coworkers are raising feedback in a process that does not provide for anonymous feedback in the first place is not "doxxing" them. (EDIT: Note that this particular process was not a peer review process - academic peer review is done by people from another institution, and selected by the venue after submitting a paper. This was a pre-submission internal review process which has never been billed as academic peer review.)
      - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
        > process that does not provide for anonymous feedback What makes you say this? Ultimately, the process is determined by Google. She had managers say she couldn't get that information. Why wouldn't that be the end of the conversation with regards to their identities?
miked85 6y ago
She gave her employer an ultimatum, threatening to quit if she didn't get her way. They called her bluff. I don't see how that is the same as being fired. At that point she was on her way out, one way or another; most employers would rather not work with people like this.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dmarchand90 6y ago
  I think the subtle, yet important, difference is that she said she would quit by a certain date and they terminated her immediately. Given her role is likely just for PR it seems rather foolish not to at least give her two weeks notice or something.
  - peeters 6y ago
    This isn't at all unusual when someone is quitting on bad terms, is it?
  - yulaow 6y ago
    In her group email she also asked other employees to stop working in any other related project. I mean, I don't see how google could NOT terminate her after such an event. I am in a nation with extremly strong worker protection law but that action alone would be enough to fire you on the spot.
    - lostjohnny 6y ago
      > but that action alone would be enough to fire you on the spot. They are not as strong as you think then. In countries where there are strong work protections law striking is a right, you don't get paid for the time you don't show up at work but you can obviously convince an entire department or an entire company workforce to go on strike, without consequences. Without it the protection is not strong, it means an entire company against the individual worker, which is obviously unfair (regardless of what you think about work protections law, Google against a single human being it's an unfair battle, that's why "strong protection" means that the worker deson't have to fight alone and can call other workers to join the fight).
ykevinator 6y ago
Scientist is a stretch
zartar 6y ago
I find the semi-regular condemnations from employees of big tech companies hollow. If you work for one of these companies and find their behavior unsavory, go work somewhere else - this is actually what might cause executives at these companies to reflect on how they might change course. The fact that most of these employees could easily get well paying (just not as _ridiculously well paying_) jobs elsewhere to me feels like they are not staying out of necessity, rather they are looking to assuage their conscious through statements like these, and continue collecting their exorbitant pay.
- gfodor 6y ago
  The Facebook “walkout” was a particularly hilarious example of this when you consider the second step of the walkout: walking back in.
  - true_religion 6y ago
    If you look at trade unions, you see that walkouts, work slow downs and temporary strikes are commonly used. The goal is never to destroy the company but to simply force them to the bargaining table by reminding them of the economic power workers provide. A total strike or worse a union quitting a company all together is a nuclear option.
    - xiphias2 6y ago
      It may work with physical work, but at FANG companies software engineers will just make up for it on the weekends at nights. Stack ranking works wonderfully at making engineers to compete in working as much as they can (which is not a bad thing, just how the system works).
      - true_religion 6y ago
        All that stuff sounds like systematic abuses that a union would reduce. The problem of the effectiveness of Facebook employee walkouts stems from the fact that they aren’t a real union, so the employer can just force them to make it up without providing for any additional compensation. Any protest is a null option until the whole thing catalyzes and they form a union to address the repeated disregard the company shows them. The only way for the company to avoid this is to self regulate or at least pay lip service to buy more time.
loopz 6y ago
Threatening to leave is often times the ONLY leverage a worker has. What other leverage can a human utilize, in order to get their concerns addressed? And how seriously does Google managers really take AI ethics, when they fail to resolve such an issue internally? This is troublesome on so many levels and a huge red flag anything to do with AI and Google.
Footkerchief 6y ago
"Condemn firing" is a misleadingly narrow headline that focuses undue attention on the resign/fire question. The important part of the story is not the HR machinations of her departure, but what caused the situation to escalate to that point. The letter itself makes this clear -- its condemnations and demands go way beyond Gebru's employment: https://googlewalkout.medium.com/standing-with-dr-timnit-gebru-isupporttimnit-believeblackwomen-6dadc300d382 https://googlewalkout.medium.com/standing-with-dr-timnit-geb... > Dr. Gebru has faced defensiveness, racism, gaslighting, research censorship, and now a retaliatory firing The letter goes on: > In late November, five weeks after the piece had been internally reviewed and approved for publication through standard processes, Google leadership made the decision to censor it, without warning or cause. The demands are also not about the firing itself: > explain the process by which the paper was unilaterally rejected by leadership
idk_bro_idk 6y ago
All those 1200 should threaten to go on strike and hit Google's profits.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  1200 employees going on strike will literally have no negative impact on Google's bottom line, at least not unless they do it for a long time period. A lot of the money that comes in is basically automatic, it's being produced by ad sells and stuff like that. You'd need a massive subset of the company's staff to go on strike (not just 1200) before that would have any impact on whether the money-making machine continues to function. In a case like this walkouts or strikes by the tech workers have more of a symbolic purpose + impact on future deadlines/releases than a direct impact on revenue. Maybe if the entire SRE department went on strike and stopped maintaining the datacenters that would put a dent in the numbers due to degraded service, but something like that would probably just doom the company entirely even if they went back to work after a bit.
  - paperdropper 6y ago
    > Maybe if the entire SRE department went on strike and stopped maintaining the datacenters that would put a dent in the numbers due to degraded service, but something like that would probably just doom the company entirely even if they went back to work after a bit. It's the threat of being able to strike and potentially cause that much damage to the business that makes it powerful. No-one really wants to strike, actually going through with it is the final step when the company fails to meet the workers' demands - no point in making a threat if you don't demonstrate it when the circumstances arise, it's toothless otherwise.
InTheArena 6y ago
Google is an company that demands extraordinarily high ideological conformance from its workers. Unfortunately for Google it new longer controls the exact specification of what is and is not acceptable thought at Google, and much like the French revolution it’s being pushed into directions that is management may or may not agree with. What should be a fairly reasonable question – is this person a good employee or not is immediately contaminated by questions they have nothing to do with job performance.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "What should be a fairly reasonable question – is this person a good employee or not is immediately contaminated by questions they have nothing to do with job performance." There are all sorts of non-performance considerations that are important, not just at Google, but at pretty much every other company. One of those considerations is ethics. Another is legality. Another is public relations. Which of these do you think companies should ignore?
  - metabagel 6y ago
    I thought those are also job performance considerations?
    - pmoriarty 6y ago
      If they are job performance considerations, then what is the person I replied to talking about?
      - InTheArena 6y ago
        Ideological conformance. Google has a particular world view that insists that privacy is not a human right, that certain political positions are verboten and unions are bad.
        vacheron 6y ago
spacekitcat 6y ago
I respect that she sacrificed her prestigious role to force Google to at least admit where they really stand.
- rafiki6 6y ago
  Unfortunately, it's clearly more complex than that. To be fair, it seems that she has made it about that to an extent and media ran with it. We haven't heard from google or her superiors. It's clear they didn't agree but to what extent? And why did she need to publicly quit? Again, she quit. She wasn't asked to leave or resign. She volunteered to do so because she had a moral disagreement with the company. And that's fair. We don't really know if she was treated fairly or unfairly just her claims of what happened.
- loopz 6y ago
  "Old men's club" is real and need a shakeup. However, the elite clubs hurt both genders, not just one of them. It is not balanced by an equally forceful swing the other direction, but by emphasis on mutual respect for diversity of people. Sometimes measures need to be put in place to get the ball rolling, but they should be temporary.
  - spacekitcat 6y ago
    I think we agree.
    - loopz 6y ago
      Yeah, but "The Middle Path" is a hard sell to the masses.
      - spacekitcat 6y ago
        I think there's a weird seam of irrational rage around the mere suggestion that tech isn't some utopian meritocracy. I find it jarring.
variable11 6y ago
Fire them too.
variable11 6y ago
Never hire a worthless clown who has $100,000 in student debt and a degree in Victimology. These worthless people can add nothing of value to anything.
solvorn 6y ago
“Please don’t add me to the Twitter hit list, Timnit”
rendall 6y ago
I get that Timnit Gebru is well respected in the field of AI ethics, and that the demand via HR that she retract the paper without discussion or appeal at the 11th hour sounds super shady That email blast though. It made it so much worse for her position.
flippinburgers 6y ago
I am more than happy to take one of their places.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
LatteLazy 6y ago
It's sort of meta but... The article repeatedly mentions Gebru's race and sex and includes it for the only Google employee quoted. Why does that matter? Is she more reliable because of her skin colour? Is he less reliable because of his genitals? The cynic in me feels like I'm being subtly trolled. Or maybe I'm just oversensitive? :)
- that_guy_iain 6y ago
  I think they're trying to make out it's racial and she was slienced on pointing out a racial issue.
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    It just seems to be conflating so many things: personal racism against her (which I see no evidence of) and institutional racism (which is some of what she researches but then her and his race are irrelevant). That plus sexism. Plus academic freedom and employee-employer relations and PR. In the end, it's a mess of nothings, rather and 1 solid something imho...
- apta 6y ago
  It's typical SJW narrative. People are tired of it, it's like the boy who cried wolf story. Hopefully at some point people will just learn to ignore these "woke" SJWs as they have their tantrums.
that_guy_iain 6y ago
This article read like her paper was on bias. But isn't the paper on the environmental effects of large models? The article reads like Google tried to slience her on something racial.
civilized 6y ago
According to a seemingly credible account from a former employee, Timnit terrorized a Google Brain manuscript discussion forum with unfounded accusations of racist disregard for her contributions https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/comment/geqzqlq https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/com... The thread is filled with agreeing comments from many people who seem to be ex-Google and who had access to the relevant thread.
- amilios 6y ago
  This is crazy, I'm not sure why people aren't taking this more into account. By all accounts Timnit was an extremely toxic person to work with. Sure, perhaps she shouldn't have been fired for this paper, Google probably saw an opportunity to remove her that wouldn't be a PR nightmare for them. But regardless, it's hard for me personally to see them as being in the wrong given Timnit's history.
  - civilized 6y ago
    Gebru's brand of Twitter woke-scoldery is taken for granted these days. Par for the course. We all know the tired rhetoric that will be trotted out to defend it, so much so that we could write it ourselves. A member of the corporate elite criticizing, let alone firing, a black woman for race baiting is now beyond the pale. So they got rid of her indirectly, by making her working conditions unappealing enough to induce her to quit. Too bad some Director Karen of Whatever lost her nerve and ended it on her terms rather than Gebru's. No finesse!
leftyted 6y ago
Having read the paper (https://gofile.io/d/WfcxoF https://gofile.io/d/WfcxoF), I can't take the idea that Google wanted to suppress it seriously (as the article argues). In the paper, another paper is summarized describing the environmental costs of training large models. It is then argued that global warming will disproportionately affect marginalized people. This constitutes "environmental racism" because the main beneficiaries of these models are rich white people whereas the people bearing the costs are poor people who live near the equator. In my mind, this is two-points-make-a-line thinking. The rest of the paper is more interesting. It argues that machine learning is conservative in that it "reinforces hegemonic language". I think this is true. Models are trained using data, data is what exists rather than what we would like to exist. If you're unhappy with what exists (as Gebru is, terribly), this represents a problem. Two of her solutions are "curating" data (censoring data) and "working with panels of experiential experts through the Diverse Voices methodology" (constituting powerful groups made up of her ideological allies). I think these solutions are dead-ends. It seems to me that we have to make peace with the conservatism inherent in these models (and maybe all models). The paper also argues (I think rightly) that problems will materialize "should humans encounter seemingly coherent language model output and take it for the words of some person or organization who have accountability for what is said". In other words, we grant other humans responsibility for what they say and do but what about models that can mimic humans very accurately? A similar problem exists today when a Google or Youtube account is erroneously locked by some algorithm. There's a sense that, really, no one is responsible for this outcome because an algorithm did it. Even if the owner manages to get his account restored, there's no clear way to assign responsibility for the mistake. Perhaps this problem will become even worse if we start to see algorithms powered by models that are near-indistinguishable from people. Anyway, the paper doesn't seem controversial to me. It seems clear that Gebru's strident tone and personal style were the cause of her firing/resignation. Jeff Dean's claim that the paper was rejected for not citing other papers may be false. The truth seems much simpler: based on her own public communications, Gebru felt she was the subject of "harassment" and "dehumanization" but those grievances seem to be hyperbole, and the personal injury that she felt became an excuse for her to treat her coworkers poorly. In other words, she didn't drop her twitter persona at work.
stevefan1999 6y ago
Remember the last time Google tried to make the algorithm less biased only after some egregious cases of comparing Africans to gorillas have been found. https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas-photo-recognition-algorithm-ai https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go... At least Google did better last time ngl
tpoacher 6y ago
As a scientist, at the very least I would also need to know how many workers applaud the firing, and how many are actively uninterested, otherwise quoting that number is entirely without meaning.
giardini 6y ago
Fire them, all of them!8-))
RickJWagner 6y ago
Per Google search, Google currently employs about 119,000 people. So 1,200 condemn it, and 117,800 do not condemn it.

129 points by soylentbeige 6y ago

This article is from a couple of days ago. The story the article is about has been posted to HN several times and I think that there are may be some relevant updates to the story since this article was published if you wish to dive in: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=false&query=Timnit%20Gebru&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...

commandlinefan 6y ago

But how many applaud it? (In secret because supporting this is something you might get fired for...)

pmyteh 6y ago
You might get fired for... supporting your bosses' decision to fire someone?
- freshhawk 6y ago
  Some people have a stance they chose, that this is some Daily Mail "political correctness gone mad" thing, because SJW cultural domination controls all our lives. They're working through some cognitive dissonance.
  - adnzzzzZ 6y ago
    It does though. For instance, were any articles framed as [More than X Google workers condemn firing of James Damore], despite that actually being the case? The media, universities and other elite institutions always support the "SJW cultural domination" stance on all these issues and the discussion is always framed from that perspective. You'll find similar framings such as [More than X GitHub workers condemn GitHub's deals with ICE]. You'll never find [More than X GitHub workers condemn removal of meritocracy rug], despite that also being the case. You may not like me pointing this out, but that's how it happens. It's not cognitive dissonance to see that that's how these things go.
    - pmoriarty 6y ago
      "You'll never find [More than X GitHub workers condemn removal of meritocracy rug], despite that also being the case" How would you know it's the case unless, say, 1200 GitHub workers sign a letter of protest as they did in the case of Google? Sure, we could imagine that 1200 GitHub employees objected, but that's not the same thing, is it?
      - pault 6y ago
        People are afraid of being labeled a bigot and having their careers ruined because they have a nuanced opinion about an issue related to identity politics.
    - freshhawk 6y ago
      The cognitive dissonance is that a huge number of highly respected people in the field, and coworkers, said "yeah, this was racist bullshit", and the actual paper in question has been seen by a lot of people by now. But if you are committed to the stance that racism doesn't exist and this is all a grand SJW conspiracy then you have to grasp at straws to ignore the overwhelming number of experts disagreeing with you.
      - adnzzzzZ 6y ago
        I don't believe in experts. They have no power to change my mind about any social issue whatsoever. So them saying "this is racist" means nothing to me. There is no cognitive dissonance. You're projecting it into me because you think I think like you, that I care about what experts have to say, when I don't.
        freshhawk 6y ago
        It was a technical question about the predictive power of language models, the biases encoded in them and the results of their use in a large system like all of Google's connected products. But I guess to your particular faith-based ideology the mention of race makes it a "social issue"? Anyway I'm sorry I misclassified you and in the process insulted your religious beliefs. That wasn't my intention.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Gebru and her supporters say that she was fired in part because she's a black woman and the racist Google culture rejected her. If they don't want others to frame it as a "political correctness gone mad" thing, they should drop the race baiting.
  - claudiawerner 6y ago
    Exactly. Someone reading the headline and not knowing that Timnit was an empoyee of Google would just read the headline into their confirmation bias.
- dx87 6y ago
  More like, you support the decision, but your immediate boss doesn't, so they start looking for reasons to get rid of you that don't have any official connection to your stance. I remember a while back seeing leaked documents from Google where some managers shared an unofficial blacklist of employees to never promote and try to get rid of because of their political views.
  - tehwebguy 6y ago
    Every non-union employee in every state other than Montana has this potential problem. The difference is in smaller companies the unspoken rules are often spoken out loud and the employees don’t make Google money.
    - dschuler 6y ago
      How does Montana deal with that problem differently?
  - chinesempire 6y ago
    Is that true? Why do people call it "the land of the free" then?
  - eat_veggies 6y ago
    Why are we conjuring hypothetical situations in which you are oppressed, instead of condemning the concrete case where Jeff Dean looked for flimsy reasons to get rid of Timnit Gebru?
    - dontblink 6y ago
      CA is an at will state. He can fire her for no reason if he wishes, let alone a "flimsy" one.
    - vacheron 6y ago
      How is this a flimsy reason? Trying to paint this decision as an example of oppression is either ignorant or dishonest. Her actions would have gotten almost anyone fired from any company. If the accounts from ex/current-Googlers are true about her being difficult to work with and creating an uncomfortable work environment I would have expected Timnit to have been terminated long ago.
- j4yav 6y ago
  There is a strange thing in modern discourse where there is an advantage in first establishing yourself as a victim before making your point.
chinesempire 6y ago
Can you really get fired for disagreeing with something?
cataphract 6y ago
Judging from the comments from some of her ex-colleagues, she was not exactly an easy person to deal with: > The GPT-3 thread you describe was my first exposure to Timnit. Watching that thread unfold left me feeling upset, frustrated, and disappointed. > I was so excited in anticipation of other Googler's reactions and insights about GPT-3, but that thread got immediately derailed by Timnit into claims of racism, not being listened to, dehumanization, that the whole forum became icy and dead after that. https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_timnit_gebru_and_google_megathread/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t...
- whynotminot 6y ago
  I'm still trying to gather more insight into what actually happened here. But you have to know upper management calculated there'd be blowback for firing someone of her stature, position, background, race, gender, etc. They did it anyway. That to me says that keeping her around was worse than the storm they knew they'd generate by firing her.
  - vacheron 6y ago
    It's a bit ridiculous to me that the current climate necessitates that people of particular backgrounds are more or less convenient to fire.

paperdropper 6y ago

A draft copy of the disputed paper was posted over in Reddit, if this is of interest to anyone: https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_timnit_gebru_and_google_megathread/gepcliq https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t... https://gofile.io/d/WfcxoF https://gofile.io/d/WfcxoF

muglug 6y ago
Whether or not I agree with the conclusions, that’s exactly the sort of paper one might expect to be written by someone whose job title includes the words “ethics” and “AI”. I’m not sure what Google expected.
- paperdropper 6y ago
  The other curious thing is, behind the pink-boxed redactions are the names of four other Google employees. I'm wondering why they haven't been reprimanded in the same way. At least, not that we know of.
  - bitcharmer 6y ago
    Maybe unlike the hero of the story they refrained from making racist, misandric remarks about their bosses on Twitter?
  - that_guy_iain 6y ago
    Well, she wasn't reprimanded for writing the paper nor for publishing it. In fact, she wasn't even reprimanded as far as I know for telling other employees to stop working on DEI. She told them she wanted confidental information or she will quit on a date she would like. They said they would not give her that information and that she is no longer welcome at the company. This isn't really reprimanding or even a normal firing. If I tell my boss do X or I quit and they say "Thanks for your work, we accept your resigination and the legal notice period applies." Fair play.
    - paperdropper 6y ago

IshKebab 6y ago

I thought she offered her resignation and they accepted?

geofft 6y ago
She offered to resign on a particular schedule to work out things with her team if they insisted on retracting the paper. They terminated her employment immediately, while she was on vacation, because of an email she sent to the ERG about it, and they didn't even inform her direct manager. Whatever they accepted, it wasn't the resignation she offered. (And even if they had done so, I expect the folks here to remain unhappy about the circumstances that lead up to her offering her resignation. It's not a thing you do if things are going well.)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- miked85 6y ago
  > She offered to resign on a particular schedule It is not out of the ordinary at all for companies to walk people out on the day of resignation. The company is not required or even expected to abide by whatever schedule is presented to them.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    If the employee says "I'm giving you 1 month formal notice of resignation", and the company responds with "effective immediately you are terminated without pay or benefits", at that point it's not a resignation any more, it's a termination. In most countries (which are not "at will"), I believe if the employee had not breached their contract they could claim wrongful termination in this scenario and likely be awarded the pay they would have received for the missing notice period. This doesn't mean the company is obliged to keep the employee on premises, on the network, active etc. It is not uncommon to ask the employee to leave the premises, have security walk them out, disconnect from the network etc out of security/IP/morale/whatever concerns. But they would still be either technically employed and paid while the notice worked out or paid in lieu of notice.

throwaway_45 6y ago

Google has close to a 100k employees. I wonder how the other 99% feel. This is America no one is stopping her from starting the next google and crushing google. This reminds of the Chappelle skit when keeping it real goes wrong. She published a paper without getting it reviewed talking shit about google. I am sure she was generously compensated. If she wants to talk shit about google she should probably do it when she doesn't work there.

lagadu 6y ago
Why would she not work there, no company is perfect. Plus working there provides her with a particularly good insight when it comes to criticizing Google. This is why so many of us look down on the US and their ease of firing people that don't buy into the groupthink.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  This is not an example of "firing people that don't buy into the groupthink." She gave an ultimatum: either doxx the people who said her paper was unfit, or she quits. Google didn't give into her demands so accepted her resignation and moved her end date up because of her browbeating.
  - geofft 6y ago
    Wanting to know which coworkers are raising feedback in a process that does not provide for anonymous feedback in the first place is not "doxxing" them. (EDIT: Note that this particular process was not a peer review process - academic peer review is done by people from another institution, and selected by the venue after submitting a paper. This was a pre-submission internal review process which has never been billed as academic peer review.)
    - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
      > process that does not provide for anonymous feedback What makes you say this? Ultimately, the process is determined by Google. She had managers say she couldn't get that information. Why wouldn't that be the end of the conversation with regards to their identities?

miked85 6y ago

She gave her employer an ultimatum, threatening to quit if she didn't get her way. They called her bluff. I don't see how that is the same as being fired. At that point she was on her way out, one way or another; most employers would rather not work with people like this.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dmarchand90 6y ago
I think the subtle, yet important, difference is that she said she would quit by a certain date and they terminated her immediately. Given her role is likely just for PR it seems rather foolish not to at least give her two weeks notice or something.
- peeters 6y ago
  This isn't at all unusual when someone is quitting on bad terms, is it?
- yulaow 6y ago
  In her group email she also asked other employees to stop working in any other related project. I mean, I don't see how google could NOT terminate her after such an event. I am in a nation with extremly strong worker protection law but that action alone would be enough to fire you on the spot.
  - lostjohnny 6y ago
    > but that action alone would be enough to fire you on the spot. They are not as strong as you think then. In countries where there are strong work protections law striking is a right, you don't get paid for the time you don't show up at work but you can obviously convince an entire department or an entire company workforce to go on strike, without consequences. Without it the protection is not strong, it means an entire company against the individual worker, which is obviously unfair (regardless of what you think about work protections law, Google against a single human being it's an unfair battle, that's why "strong protection" means that the worker deson't have to fight alone and can call other workers to join the fight).

ykevinator 6y ago

Scientist is a stretch

zartar 6y ago

I find the semi-regular condemnations from employees of big tech companies hollow. If you work for one of these companies and find their behavior unsavory, go work somewhere else - this is actually what might cause executives at these companies to reflect on how they might change course. The fact that most of these employees could easily get well paying (just not as _ridiculously well paying_) jobs elsewhere to me feels like they are not staying out of necessity, rather they are looking to assuage their conscious through statements like these, and continue collecting their exorbitant pay.

gfodor 6y ago
The Facebook “walkout” was a particularly hilarious example of this when you consider the second step of the walkout: walking back in.
- true_religion 6y ago
  If you look at trade unions, you see that walkouts, work slow downs and temporary strikes are commonly used. The goal is never to destroy the company but to simply force them to the bargaining table by reminding them of the economic power workers provide. A total strike or worse a union quitting a company all together is a nuclear option.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    It may work with physical work, but at FANG companies software engineers will just make up for it on the weekends at nights. Stack ranking works wonderfully at making engineers to compete in working as much as they can (which is not a bad thing, just how the system works).
    - true_religion 6y ago
      All that stuff sounds like systematic abuses that a union would reduce. The problem of the effectiveness of Facebook employee walkouts stems from the fact that they aren’t a real union, so the employer can just force them to make it up without providing for any additional compensation. Any protest is a null option until the whole thing catalyzes and they form a union to address the repeated disregard the company shows them. The only way for the company to avoid this is to self regulate or at least pay lip service to buy more time.

loopz 6y ago

Threatening to leave is often times the ONLY leverage a worker has. What other leverage can a human utilize, in order to get their concerns addressed? And how seriously does Google managers really take AI ethics, when they fail to resolve such an issue internally? This is troublesome on so many levels and a huge red flag anything to do with AI and Google.

Footkerchief 6y ago

"Condemn firing" is a misleadingly narrow headline that focuses undue attention on the resign/fire question. The important part of the story is not the HR machinations of her departure, but what caused the situation to escalate to that point. The letter itself makes this clear -- its condemnations and demands go way beyond Gebru's employment: https://googlewalkout.medium.com/standing-with-dr-timnit-gebru-isupporttimnit-believeblackwomen-6dadc300d382 https://googlewalkout.medium.com/standing-with-dr-timnit-geb... > Dr. Gebru has faced defensiveness, racism, gaslighting, research censorship, and now a retaliatory firing The letter goes on: > In late November, five weeks after the piece had been internally reviewed and approved for publication through standard processes, Google leadership made the decision to censor it, without warning or cause. The demands are also not about the firing itself: > explain the process by which the paper was unilaterally rejected by leadership

idk_bro_idk 6y ago

All those 1200 should threaten to go on strike and hit Google's profits.

kevingadd 6y ago
1200 employees going on strike will literally have no negative impact on Google's bottom line, at least not unless they do it for a long time period. A lot of the money that comes in is basically automatic, it's being produced by ad sells and stuff like that. You'd need a massive subset of the company's staff to go on strike (not just 1200) before that would have any impact on whether the money-making machine continues to function. In a case like this walkouts or strikes by the tech workers have more of a symbolic purpose + impact on future deadlines/releases than a direct impact on revenue. Maybe if the entire SRE department went on strike and stopped maintaining the datacenters that would put a dent in the numbers due to degraded service, but something like that would probably just doom the company entirely even if they went back to work after a bit.
- paperdropper 6y ago
  > Maybe if the entire SRE department went on strike and stopped maintaining the datacenters that would put a dent in the numbers due to degraded service, but something like that would probably just doom the company entirely even if they went back to work after a bit. It's the threat of being able to strike and potentially cause that much damage to the business that makes it powerful. No-one really wants to strike, actually going through with it is the final step when the company fails to meet the workers' demands - no point in making a threat if you don't demonstrate it when the circumstances arise, it's toothless otherwise.

InTheArena 6y ago

Google is an company that demands extraordinarily high ideological conformance from its workers. Unfortunately for Google it new longer controls the exact specification of what is and is not acceptable thought at Google, and much like the French revolution it’s being pushed into directions that is management may or may not agree with. What should be a fairly reasonable question – is this person a good employee or not is immediately contaminated by questions they have nothing to do with job performance.

pmoriarty 6y ago
"What should be a fairly reasonable question – is this person a good employee or not is immediately contaminated by questions they have nothing to do with job performance." There are all sorts of non-performance considerations that are important, not just at Google, but at pretty much every other company. One of those considerations is ethics. Another is legality. Another is public relations. Which of these do you think companies should ignore?
- metabagel 6y ago
  I thought those are also job performance considerations?
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    If they are job performance considerations, then what is the person I replied to talking about?
    - InTheArena 6y ago
      Ideological conformance. Google has a particular world view that insists that privacy is not a human right, that certain political positions are verboten and unions are bad.
      - vacheron 6y ago

spacekitcat 6y ago

I respect that she sacrificed her prestigious role to force Google to at least admit where they really stand.

rafiki6 6y ago
Unfortunately, it's clearly more complex than that. To be fair, it seems that she has made it about that to an extent and media ran with it. We haven't heard from google or her superiors. It's clear they didn't agree but to what extent? And why did she need to publicly quit? Again, she quit. She wasn't asked to leave or resign. She volunteered to do so because she had a moral disagreement with the company. And that's fair. We don't really know if she was treated fairly or unfairly just her claims of what happened.
loopz 6y ago
"Old men's club" is real and need a shakeup. However, the elite clubs hurt both genders, not just one of them. It is not balanced by an equally forceful swing the other direction, but by emphasis on mutual respect for diversity of people. Sometimes measures need to be put in place to get the ball rolling, but they should be temporary.
- spacekitcat 6y ago
  I think we agree.
  - loopz 6y ago
    Yeah, but "The Middle Path" is a hard sell to the masses.
    - spacekitcat 6y ago
      I think there's a weird seam of irrational rage around the mere suggestion that tech isn't some utopian meritocracy. I find it jarring.

variable11 6y ago

Fire them too.

variable11 6y ago

Never hire a worthless clown who has $100,000 in student debt and a degree in Victimology. These worthless people can add nothing of value to anything.

solvorn 6y ago

“Please don’t add me to the Twitter hit list, Timnit”

rendall 6y ago

I get that Timnit Gebru is well respected in the field of AI ethics, and that the demand via HR that she retract the paper without discussion or appeal at the 11th hour sounds super shady That email blast though. It made it so much worse for her position.

flippinburgers 6y ago

I am more than happy to take one of their places.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

LatteLazy 6y ago

It's sort of meta but... The article repeatedly mentions Gebru's race and sex and includes it for the only Google employee quoted. Why does that matter? Is she more reliable because of her skin colour? Is he less reliable because of his genitals? The cynic in me feels like I'm being subtly trolled. Or maybe I'm just oversensitive? :)

that_guy_iain 6y ago
I think they're trying to make out it's racial and she was slienced on pointing out a racial issue.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  It just seems to be conflating so many things: personal racism against her (which I see no evidence of) and institutional racism (which is some of what she researches but then her and his race are irrelevant). That plus sexism. Plus academic freedom and employee-employer relations and PR. In the end, it's a mess of nothings, rather and 1 solid something imho...
apta 6y ago
It's typical SJW narrative. People are tired of it, it's like the boy who cried wolf story. Hopefully at some point people will just learn to ignore these "woke" SJWs as they have their tantrums.

that_guy_iain 6y ago

This article read like her paper was on bias. But isn't the paper on the environmental effects of large models? The article reads like Google tried to slience her on something racial.

civilized 6y ago

According to a seemingly credible account from a former employee, Timnit terrorized a Google Brain manuscript discussion forum with unfounded accusations of racist disregard for her contributions https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/comment/geqzqlq https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/com... The thread is filled with agreeing comments from many people who seem to be ex-Google and who had access to the relevant thread.

amilios 6y ago
This is crazy, I'm not sure why people aren't taking this more into account. By all accounts Timnit was an extremely toxic person to work with. Sure, perhaps she shouldn't have been fired for this paper, Google probably saw an opportunity to remove her that wouldn't be a PR nightmare for them. But regardless, it's hard for me personally to see them as being in the wrong given Timnit's history.
- civilized 6y ago
  Gebru's brand of Twitter woke-scoldery is taken for granted these days. Par for the course. We all know the tired rhetoric that will be trotted out to defend it, so much so that we could write it ourselves. A member of the corporate elite criticizing, let alone firing, a black woman for race baiting is now beyond the pale. So they got rid of her indirectly, by making her working conditions unappealing enough to induce her to quit. Too bad some Director Karen of Whatever lost her nerve and ended it on her terms rather than Gebru's. No finesse!

leftyted 6y ago

Having read the paper (https://gofile.io/d/WfcxoF https://gofile.io/d/WfcxoF), I can't take the idea that Google wanted to suppress it seriously (as the article argues). In the paper, another paper is summarized describing the environmental costs of training large models. It is then argued that global warming will disproportionately affect marginalized people. This constitutes "environmental racism" because the main beneficiaries of these models are rich white people whereas the people bearing the costs are poor people who live near the equator. In my mind, this is two-points-make-a-line thinking. The rest of the paper is more interesting. It argues that machine learning is conservative in that it "reinforces hegemonic language". I think this is true. Models are trained using data, data is what exists rather than what we would like to exist. If you're unhappy with what exists (as Gebru is, terribly), this represents a problem. Two of her solutions are "curating" data (censoring data) and "working with panels of experiential experts through the Diverse Voices methodology" (constituting powerful groups made up of her ideological allies). I think these solutions are dead-ends. It seems to me that we have to make peace with the conservatism inherent in these models (and maybe all models). The paper also argues (I think rightly) that problems will materialize "should humans encounter seemingly coherent language model output and take it for the words of some person or organization who have accountability for what is said". In other words, we grant other humans responsibility for what they say and do but what about models that can mimic humans very accurately? A similar problem exists today when a Google or Youtube account is erroneously locked by some algorithm. There's a sense that, really, no one is responsible for this outcome because an algorithm did it. Even if the owner manages to get his account restored, there's no clear way to assign responsibility for the mistake. Perhaps this problem will become even worse if we start to see algorithms powered by models that are near-indistinguishable from people. Anyway, the paper doesn't seem controversial to me. It seems clear that Gebru's strident tone and personal style were the cause of her firing/resignation. Jeff Dean's claim that the paper was rejected for not citing other papers may be false. The truth seems much simpler: based on her own public communications, Gebru felt she was the subject of "harassment" and "dehumanization" but those grievances seem to be hyperbole, and the personal injury that she felt became an excuse for her to treat her coworkers poorly. In other words, she didn't drop her twitter persona at work.

stevefan1999 6y ago

Remember the last time Google tried to make the algorithm less biased only after some egregious cases of comparing Africans to gorillas have been found. https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas-photo-recognition-algorithm-ai https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go... At least Google did better last time ngl

tpoacher 6y ago

As a scientist, at the very least I would also need to know how many workers applaud the firing, and how many are actively uninterested, otherwise quoting that number is entirely without meaning.

giardini 6y ago

Fire them, all of them!8-))

RickJWagner 6y ago

Per Google search, Google currently employs about 119,000 people. So 1,200 condemn it, and 117,800 do not condemn it.