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AI ethics research conference suspends Google sponsorship

293 points by imagine99 6y ago

rubenfiszel 6y ago
Bold move from ACM but good for them!
loa_in_ 6y ago
Google had it coming when they supported autonomous warfare AI
eqvinox 6y ago
Well, there's at least 2 perspectives here. If the two people were fired due to race, gender, or even ethical opinion, this reaction is more than appropriate. If the two people were fired due to breaking established rules and processes, exfiltrating files or similar — this can very well backfire on minorities. It indirectly creates another hurdle to hiring a minority member if the company needs to consider that they can't viably fire them for breaking rules. I'm unaware of good public information supporting either perspective. And both the ex-employees and Google may be restricted from publishing sensitive information to support their cause. I'm not sure how to form an informed opinion on this, honestly.
- ihsw 6y ago
  Just like the #MeToo movement, such predatory behavior sets equality back years. Equity is ultimately a regressive ideology, both in practice and in theory.
- probably_wrong 6y ago
  I'm not following your second perspective. If I read you comment correctly, your second perspective would be "Gebru and Mitchell were fired with good cause, but people are rushing to their defense only because they are members of a minority". If that's what you meant, I would counterargue: I haven't seen anything in this saga that implies anything of the sort. Simplified, it is my understanding that people either defend the firing claiming that Gebru and Mitchell acted in bad faith or object to it claiming that their only fault was speaking the truth back to Google (who hired them to do so).
- panic 6y ago
  The idea of something “backfiring on minorities” as an entire group is part of the problem here. The fact that there was a backlash after someone was fired can’t be used as a justification for not hiring other people whose only relationship to the original person is “also some kind of minority”.
  - Causality1 6y ago
    Legally, no. From a practical standpoint, people do whatever they think they can get away with.
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      Reasonably, no. It's not a reasonable conclusion to make. Most people are minorities.
      - imbnwa 6y ago
        In America? Are we cutting up the European-American demographic by gender and sexuality, cause that'd be the most immediate way for me to grasp this idea?
        wizzwizz4 6y ago
        Gender, sexuality, neurodivergence, “race” (however you define it), “caste” (however you define it), disabilities (however you define them, tbh, though it generally makes more sense than “race” or “caste”)… Either I just have a really skewed social circle, or most people are minorities in at least one category.
    - imbnwa 6y ago
      We have to resort to legal solutions because the sad truth is that you can't at all trust entire demographics to alter or even reflect on their ethical stance. I mean, there are enough people on this very board whose response to Black diversity initiatives in particular, is that they're too low IQ on average and therefore will be disruptive to team productivity and cohesion, despite people like Naseem Taleb going after IQ measurements.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I don’t think this is an example of “can’t viably be fired”. They don’t seem to be saying Google or its employees are banned from the conference; they just don’t want Google’s money. (And Gebru used to be on the executive committee for this conference, so it can’t be a surprise to Google that they might be on her side.)
  - eqvinox 6y ago
    I wish you were right, but IMHO you need to take the devil's (racist's) advocate position here. Even an average not-really-racist but-slightly-prejudiced ("non-woke") HR manager can look at this and go "oh, Google got f_cked so hard for firing these two minority members... I really don't want to possibly end up in that situation"... and, even if that's certainly discriminatory thinking, it's not "wrong" on the pure logical level. And even worse, it's unlikely to be noticed and very hard to fight. The decision not to hire someone won't come with an explainer why, and proving discriminatory practice there is quite hard. ... and the HR manager may even do this subconsciously! In that case noone is even aware discrimination is happening. (Which is why blanking applications is so important!)
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I have no doubt that there are bad consequences to the attitude that anything which happens to anyone is about their race. I just don't think that this particular happening is an example.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- geofft 6y ago
  It is, unfortunately, a pretty common thing in our society to have rules that are selectively enforced. How often did the NYPD stop-and-frisk a trader walking down Wall Street? In that case, the pressure isn't so much "don't hire minorities" as "don't be more stringent about enforcing your established rules and processes on certain groups of people," which is a great pressure. Gebru has spoken publicly about the allegation that she broke processes. See this thread: https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1335017526112227329 https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1335017526112227329 Notably, the official description of the process includes the sentence, "There is no such thing as the perfect policy. Fortunately Googlers like to do the right thing. Please do that here—read the policy and do what makes sense."
pmontra 6y ago
Google translation of the original German text: Google is not allowed to sponsor the Conference of Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) this year. This has been announced by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The reason for this is the dismissal of two AI researchers and allegations of racism. The business relationship is considered paused, but not ended. The British company DeepMind, which belongs to the Google group, is still allowed to participate - the break does not affect relationships with other big tech companies. Michael Ekstrand, co-chair of the conference sponsors, justifies the decision with the layoffs of Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, former leaders of the ethics and artificial intelligence (AI) team at Google. Layoffs reason for a break Google had made headlines with the dismissal of the two employees in the past few months. The trigger was the planned publication of a paper. Together with colleagues, Gebru criticized the dangers posed by large AI language models. As a result, Google spoke out against publication of the paper as long as Gebru is mentioned as a co-author. Officially, the paper "did not meet the requirements for a publication", but there was suspicion that the company was just trying to get rid of an unpleasant critic. This approach caused unrest among Google employees, and accusations of racism were also loud. Margaret Mitchel, founder and co-head of the ethical AI team, was fired a short time later for attempting to use automated scripts to find evidence of the discriminatory treatment of her colleague in emails. Google's mail system did not escape this and locked the AI researcher out of the system. Recently, the company announced some internal changes in how it handles its AI teams and their employees, as well as the research results. Suresh Venkatasubramanian, member of the FAccT program committee, announced on Twitter last Friday that he would like to re-examine the framework conditions for sponsorship in the coming year.
- nkurz 6y ago
  https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fnews%2FGoogle-als-Sponsor-fuer-KI-Ethik-Konferenz-nicht-mehr-erwuenscht-5070341.html https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=de&tl=en&u=htt...
- andyxor 6y ago
  Gebru was fired for throwing tantrums and ultimatums to doxx her colleagues or she would resign, then blasting group email literally calling for sabotage. her colleagues were 'walking on eggshells' around her for the fear of retaliation for any minor criticism https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_timnit_gebru_and_google_megathread/gepq3u8/?sort=top https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t... Mitchell was fired for exfiltrating thousands of files and sending to external accounts. https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/20/google-targets-ai-ethics-lead-margaret-mitchell-after-firing-timnit-gebru/ https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/20/google-targets-ai-ethics-...
turbinerneiter 6y ago
Google should have never started hiring ethical AI researchers. They should have hired AI researchers and made their stuff available to independent ethics researchers. These independent researchers should be employed by i.e. a university and funded by government funds, maybe even additionally with an AI regulation fee (i.e. like car makers have to pay to certify their cars). It makes no sense for them to hire their critics and then think they can stay independent. You are basically paying people to shit on your own products. Makes no sense.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  > You are basically paying people to shit on your own products. Makes no sense. It's good to be critical of your own products to make them better. But you have to actually be willing to do that for it all to work.
  - evilpotatoes 6y ago
    The criticism would need to be constructive to be useful, or at least specific enough to act on. Also, you can't go embarrassing the parent company, especially one as image-conscious as google.
    - the_duke 6y ago
      Any kind of public criticism is embarrassing from a PR perspective. Either you accept that, or you don't. "Ethics researches" that can't publish public criticism , with minimal oversight restricted to preventing IP leaks, are a pointless exercise in fake responsibility posturing.
      - bitcurious 6y ago
        Agree to disagree. One of the main “enforcement arms” of ethics research is to say the unsaid things out loud. Saying them introduces legal liability onto the company in future lawsuits. I.e. “Google knew that X would result in Y and they still released X; they should pay for the damages of Y.” The PR side of ethics research barely matters in comparison.
prepend 6y ago
I wish ACM would act ethically in regards to SciHub.
- finnthehuman 6y ago
  >For the avoidance of doubt, an example of a site ACM authors may post all versions of their work to, with the exception of the final published "Version of Record", is ArXiv. >Examples of sites ACM authors may not post their work to are ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Mendeley, or Sci-Hub, as these sites are all either commercial or in some instances utilize predatory practices that violate copyright https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess Not exactly an onerous policy, nor one that makes content hard to obtain.
  - Clewza313 6y ago
    Ah, the sweet irony of accusing a free distributor of academic papers of "predatory practices", as opposed to the bloodsucking leeches at Elsevier & co.
  - prepend 6y ago
    They take sponsorship from for profit journals and that’s way worse for their field than anything Google does. I find them hypocritical for cancelling this one sponsorship for “ethical” reasons but not addressing the actual problem that is the relationship of their professional society and for profit publishing.
geswit2x 6y ago
It's ironic how one of the biggest ban-hammers on earth got banned
ReptileMan 6y ago
Since google doesn't need ethicists but vice versa I think they will be fine after this crushing blow.
gambler 6y ago
Google's push to participate in AI ethics discussions has always been about controlling the narrative. The fact that it took them firing two people for ACM to notice is rather hilarious. Just read the papers they promote. The meta-narrative is rather clear. They want to present AI/ML as something that is dangerous in the hands of individuals or smaller companies and that requires constant and direct control from experts with tons of data and resources. So they're perfectly happy to talk about stuff like model bias, but the moment you start asking uncomfortable questions about ML in general you better watch out. These topics should be handled by people without corporate ties. Period. The conflict of interests is so in-your-face, it's mind-boggling more people don't speak about it.
tiahura 6y ago
This will further marginalize AI ethics and can only be seen as a good thing. NPR did yet another piece on the topic last weekend and interviewed an AI ethics expert. When, once again, I’m being told that the reason a system has a hard time identifying the features of black faces is systemic racism, and doesn’t even mention the optic and sensor issues, I think the field needs a reboot.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  It is precisely systemic racism. People who do not have dark skin make a system. It turns out that the system performs poorly on people with dark skin, and possibly causes discriminatory outcomes. Perhaps the training data didn't have enough dark-skinned people. Or perhaps the optics and sensors didn't work well. The point is that the outcome is biased against a certain group of people, and it's (edit: partly) because that affected group of people lacks representation in the group of people developing the system (edit: , because if they were represented they would have flagged the issue and it would have all been presented and handled differently). No, it does not imply that the individual researchers are racist as such.
  - sprayk 6y ago
    Is there a way to prove that it is not caused by systemic racism? Having some unfalsifiable quality is pretty useless, and if it is the sort of thing that's never meant to end then that feels more like religion.
    - nerdponx 6y ago
      It would depend on the details of the particular situation (was there a specific news story associated with the GP?), but you'd have to show that people with the skin color in question signed off on the product. It's one thing if you produce a new model and present it at a conference, and one of the conclusion of your paper is that "this model does great on light-skinned faces but performs poorly on dark-skinned faces, we need to make improvements in optics and low-light sensing to bring up the accuracy on dark-skinned people." That's not racist, that's doing science. It's another if you are a for-profit image recognition company, or if you otherwise deploy that model in production without so much as checking to see if your model generalized well to dark-skinned faces, or without attempting to add some post-hoc bias correction, etc. We are currently in a world where the latter happens quite often. It's not just a race thing; there all kinds of inadequate "AI" systems being pushed on people that don't really work as advertised, to the detriment of some group or another (sometimes to everyone). But when it becomes a race thing, it's especially distressing to a lot of people, because Europe and the USA have long and grim histories of racism that extend up to and including the present day.
ThePowerOfFuet 6y ago
So I have to accept all of Heise's cookies or I have to pay? Wow. Heise had a better reputation than that in my mind.
- croes 6y ago
  It's even worse. The new cookie banner reads "USA Consent: By clicking on "Accept", you consent to your data being processed by providers in the USA in accordance with Art. 49 (1) DSGVO. The USA is considered to be a country with an insufficient level of data protection according to EU standards. There is a risk that your data may also be passed on to US authorities."
motohagiography 6y ago
I've written here once before that AI ethics researchers are like hiring hackers working in security, where they hold your products to an exogenous standard or ideal, which can add value, but has risks. I've worked for companies who hired and then had to fire hackers for publishing vulnerabilities in their own and in customer products. Security is fundamentally a technology governance function, and AI ethics piece is also a technology governance function, where both hackers and AI ethics researchers are in-effect activists to create awareness for change, but aren't typically who you would put in the actual governance role. An AI ethics conference has analogies to Defcon or Blackhat, in that shunning vendors because the attendees perceived that some prominent hackers were treated unfairly may have some precedents. Microsoft's relationship with Defcon in the 90's vs. post 2000 is an example of how this both happened and changed. Extending that analogy, the disconnect in the relationship between researchers and vendors was a symptom of what a disadvantage the vendors were at to the asymmetric risk that activists/hackers posed because the media story of the conflict between giant corporations being vulnerable to scrappy hackers writes itself. In terms of how to handle it, google can probably use precedents from MSFT vs. defcon, and AI ethics researchers can look at how hackers both succeeded and failed to change security and tech governance.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jcims 6y ago
  >I've written here once before that AI ethics researchers are like hiring hackers working in security Exactly, PoC or GTFO! (i'll be here all week...) (edit: maybe)
- higerordermap 6y ago
  Except these "Ethics" researchers don't have the same level of skills. And involve in virtue signalling.
  - motohagiography 6y ago
    I think it's worth addressing this even if it's going to get flagged. Hacker skills are a really long tailed distribution and the best are brilliant, the worst are just riding coattails. The ability to form an opinion about the implementation scope of a given variable for one of the many complicated functions required in ML puts you in some pretty rare air. I work in security, where I need the breadth to argue the merits of the entropy of a diversification component or the choice of an elliptic curve in a protocol design and balance it with state level attackers - and regulatory policy and legislation, with the tedious compliance aspects as a theme. The shape of the skills is weird. Where you need breadth first in a lot of areas, and depth first in ones that are not valuable outside very limited contexts. I can't vouch for where on the long tail the people involved in this controversy might be, but I don't like the odds on being dismissive of them.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
This title is confusing in English. It makes it sound like Google is the entity that made the decision not to sponsor, instead of the conference organizers. A better title would be "AI ethics conference organizers no longer want Google as sponsors".
- tantalor 6y ago
  It's confusing because passive voice is used.
  - Tomte 6y ago
    No, it's confusing, because the sentence (which isn't actually in the passive voice) is word-by-word identical to another sentence, but with with a totally different meaning. So that many people will parse it as the other sentence. (The German sentence doesn't have that ambiguity)
    - imagine99 6y ago
      I believe whoever changed the headline to this abomination doesn't understand any German - or it was done automatically by something like GPT-3 (wouldn't put it past HN ;-)). Why? Because it's the exact result that Google Translator spits out if you translate the original page in Chrome ("Google no longer wanted to sponsor the AI ethics conference"). That's of course just plain incorrect on several levels. I put a lot of effort into finding a suitable and exact translation when I originally submitted it but apparently we are now at the point where well-thought-through and correct work can simply be erased and overwritten with the result of a stupid Google AI. How fitting for this topic ;-))
      - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
        It's not really "incorrect", it's just ambiguous to the point that an average native English speaker would interpret it incorrectly. The problem is the word "wanted" in that sentence can either signify present tense passive voice (e.g. "Google (is) no longer wanted to sponsor..."), which is actually the desired interpretation here, or past tense active voice (which is how I think most native speakers would interpret it).
deleted 6y ago
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nullifidian 6y ago
Considering that "AI ethics" basically means we shouldn't have AI until we can guarantee that AI doesn't commit thought crimes(according to the current groupthink morality prevalent among the educated class), it's not surprising.
- ausbah 6y ago
  that's disingenuous at best. AI systems are already deployed in the judicial system, surveillance systems, healthcare, and who knows how many other domains that effect people's lives - with many instances to suggest that a large % of systems treat people differently along undesirable features like race or gender due to encoding negative biases or whatever the cause may be
refraincomment 6y ago
Hopefully nobody writes Google and ethics together again
dt123 6y ago
one for /r/nottheonion
purerandomness 6y ago
The title is misleading. It's confusing because the German original title make clear that ACM does not want Google to be a sponsor anymore, whereas the English title adds the possibility that it might be Google who wanted to sponsor the conference, but then decided not to.
shitpostbot 6y ago
At the risk of sounding "euphoric", it always felt to me that most of the "AI ethics" field was just hacks trying to hitch their wagon to a fast growing field without needing the discriminating credentials. At least from time to time I would have liked to see an article or two about how it would be unethical to allow humans to do something that AI was better at. Instead it's all FUD about creating a complex framework for evaluating who self driving cars should choose to kill in emergencies, when the obvious answer from an engineering perspective is to just hit the brakes. I can imagine Google was getting tired of paying out the nose for what was mostly drivel
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
perryizgr8 6y ago
What's the value of an AI ethics conference if the largest AI powerhouse is not allowed to take part?
naebother 6y ago
Good. Imagining a world where Lockheed no longer wants to sponsor the cluster-munitions ethics conference and that's viewed as a negative.
- rexreed 6y ago
  Now that sounds like a fun conference to attend. I'd be curious about the positive impacts of cluster munitions, altho I'd be hard pressed to find any. I would imagine an ethics conference on this topic would have one session: "do not use".
  - ausbah 6y ago
    "build bigger cluster munitions to deter our enemies"?
Nimitz14 6y ago
This is an ambiguous, and therefore bad, title.
kelvin0 6y ago
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Bluestein 6y ago
Big G sponsoring an AI ethics conference would be like Bonnie Parker sponsoring an ethical banking committee ...
- Bluestein 6y ago
  (Apparently somebody -did- remember who Parker was :)
  - Bluestein 6y ago
    I suffer silently the wrath of the big G! Shall I compare them to the Bonnie and Clyde due their ethical struggling for AI? Big G can do no evil, plain as that their critics only will avail squat.- (... or down votes, apparently :) While Parkers in the end got their due trap Our every browse does big G still now track Who am I meager I to claim that G cannot do evil, but lone evil be? As father time allowed for a short while that Bonnie and Clyde their banking tryst did hide now does the G control our searches all But not with evil! No! how dare we call! An ethical conundrum fore us lies Is big G fit to master our AIs? There's only one big G, I need not tell. The rest of them can burn wholesale in ...
dang 6y ago
I've changed the URL from https://www.heise.de/news/Google-als-Sponsor-fuer-KI-Ethik-Konferenz-nicht-mehr-erwuenscht-5070341.html https://www.heise.de/news/Google-als-Sponsor-fuer-KI-Ethik-K... to which seems to be the main 3rd party article on this in English. Submissions to HN need to be in English. We have deep respect for German and other languages, but HN is an English-language site. It's important that the community be able to read an article. When people can't read an article they react purely to the title, which leads to shallower discussion. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=english%20language%20site%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... I've also changed the title from "Google no longer wanted to sponsor the AI ethics conference", which unless my rudimentary German is betraying me, actually is not what the heise.de headline says. If I understand the story correctly, it's the conference that didn't want Google.
g42gregory 6y ago
In other news, Google suspends indexing of the said AI ethics research conference, so that no one knows about it.

293 points by imagine99 6y ago

rubenfiszel 6y ago

Bold move from ACM but good for them!

loa_in_ 6y ago

Google had it coming when they supported autonomous warfare AI

eqvinox 6y ago

Well, there's at least 2 perspectives here. If the two people were fired due to race, gender, or even ethical opinion, this reaction is more than appropriate. If the two people were fired due to breaking established rules and processes, exfiltrating files or similar — this can very well backfire on minorities. It indirectly creates another hurdle to hiring a minority member if the company needs to consider that they can't viably fire them for breaking rules. I'm unaware of good public information supporting either perspective. And both the ex-employees and Google may be restricted from publishing sensitive information to support their cause. I'm not sure how to form an informed opinion on this, honestly.

ihsw 6y ago
Just like the #MeToo movement, such predatory behavior sets equality back years. Equity is ultimately a regressive ideology, both in practice and in theory.
probably_wrong 6y ago
I'm not following your second perspective. If I read you comment correctly, your second perspective would be "Gebru and Mitchell were fired with good cause, but people are rushing to their defense only because they are members of a minority". If that's what you meant, I would counterargue: I haven't seen anything in this saga that implies anything of the sort. Simplified, it is my understanding that people either defend the firing claiming that Gebru and Mitchell acted in bad faith or object to it claiming that their only fault was speaking the truth back to Google (who hired them to do so).
panic 6y ago
The idea of something “backfiring on minorities” as an entire group is part of the problem here. The fact that there was a backlash after someone was fired can’t be used as a justification for not hiring other people whose only relationship to the original person is “also some kind of minority”.
- Causality1 6y ago
  Legally, no. From a practical standpoint, people do whatever they think they can get away with.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    Reasonably, no. It's not a reasonable conclusion to make. Most people are minorities.
    - imbnwa 6y ago
      In America? Are we cutting up the European-American demographic by gender and sexuality, cause that'd be the most immediate way for me to grasp this idea?
      - wizzwizz4 6y ago
        Gender, sexuality, neurodivergence, “race” (however you define it), “caste” (however you define it), disabilities (however you define them, tbh, though it generally makes more sense than “race” or “caste”)… Either I just have a really skewed social circle, or most people are minorities in at least one category.
  - imbnwa 6y ago
    We have to resort to legal solutions because the sad truth is that you can't at all trust entire demographics to alter or even reflect on their ethical stance. I mean, there are enough people on this very board whose response to Black diversity initiatives in particular, is that they're too low IQ on average and therefore will be disruptive to team productivity and cohesion, despite people like Naseem Taleb going after IQ measurements.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I don’t think this is an example of “can’t viably be fired”. They don’t seem to be saying Google or its employees are banned from the conference; they just don’t want Google’s money. (And Gebru used to be on the executive committee for this conference, so it can’t be a surprise to Google that they might be on her side.)
- eqvinox 6y ago
  I wish you were right, but IMHO you need to take the devil's (racist's) advocate position here. Even an average not-really-racist but-slightly-prejudiced ("non-woke") HR manager can look at this and go "oh, Google got f_cked so hard for firing these two minority members... I really don't want to possibly end up in that situation"... and, even if that's certainly discriminatory thinking, it's not "wrong" on the pure logical level. And even worse, it's unlikely to be noticed and very hard to fight. The decision not to hire someone won't come with an explainer why, and proving discriminatory practice there is quite hard. ... and the HR manager may even do this subconsciously! In that case noone is even aware discrimination is happening. (Which is why blanking applications is so important!)
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I have no doubt that there are bad consequences to the attitude that anything which happens to anyone is about their race. I just don't think that this particular happening is an example.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
geofft 6y ago
It is, unfortunately, a pretty common thing in our society to have rules that are selectively enforced. How often did the NYPD stop-and-frisk a trader walking down Wall Street? In that case, the pressure isn't so much "don't hire minorities" as "don't be more stringent about enforcing your established rules and processes on certain groups of people," which is a great pressure. Gebru has spoken publicly about the allegation that she broke processes. See this thread: https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1335017526112227329 https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1335017526112227329 Notably, the official description of the process includes the sentence, "There is no such thing as the perfect policy. Fortunately Googlers like to do the right thing. Please do that here—read the policy and do what makes sense."

pmontra 6y ago

Google translation of the original German text: Google is not allowed to sponsor the Conference of Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) this year. This has been announced by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The reason for this is the dismissal of two AI researchers and allegations of racism. The business relationship is considered paused, but not ended. The British company DeepMind, which belongs to the Google group, is still allowed to participate - the break does not affect relationships with other big tech companies. Michael Ekstrand, co-chair of the conference sponsors, justifies the decision with the layoffs of Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, former leaders of the ethics and artificial intelligence (AI) team at Google. Layoffs reason for a break Google had made headlines with the dismissal of the two employees in the past few months. The trigger was the planned publication of a paper. Together with colleagues, Gebru criticized the dangers posed by large AI language models. As a result, Google spoke out against publication of the paper as long as Gebru is mentioned as a co-author. Officially, the paper "did not meet the requirements for a publication", but there was suspicion that the company was just trying to get rid of an unpleasant critic. This approach caused unrest among Google employees, and accusations of racism were also loud. Margaret Mitchel, founder and co-head of the ethical AI team, was fired a short time later for attempting to use automated scripts to find evidence of the discriminatory treatment of her colleague in emails. Google's mail system did not escape this and locked the AI researcher out of the system. Recently, the company announced some internal changes in how it handles its AI teams and their employees, as well as the research results. Suresh Venkatasubramanian, member of the FAccT program committee, announced on Twitter last Friday that he would like to re-examine the framework conditions for sponsorship in the coming year.

nkurz 6y ago
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fnews%2FGoogle-als-Sponsor-fuer-KI-Ethik-Konferenz-nicht-mehr-erwuenscht-5070341.html https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=de&tl=en&u=htt...
andyxor 6y ago
Gebru was fired for throwing tantrums and ultimatums to doxx her colleagues or she would resign, then blasting group email literally calling for sabotage. her colleagues were 'walking on eggshells' around her for the fear of retaliation for any minor criticism https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_timnit_gebru_and_google_megathread/gepq3u8/?sort=top https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t... Mitchell was fired for exfiltrating thousands of files and sending to external accounts. https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/20/google-targets-ai-ethics-lead-margaret-mitchell-after-firing-timnit-gebru/ https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/20/google-targets-ai-ethics-...

turbinerneiter 6y ago

Google should have never started hiring ethical AI researchers. They should have hired AI researchers and made their stuff available to independent ethics researchers. These independent researchers should be employed by i.e. a university and funded by government funds, maybe even additionally with an AI regulation fee (i.e. like car makers have to pay to certify their cars). It makes no sense for them to hire their critics and then think they can stay independent. You are basically paying people to shit on your own products. Makes no sense.

madeofpalk 6y ago
> You are basically paying people to shit on your own products. Makes no sense. It's good to be critical of your own products to make them better. But you have to actually be willing to do that for it all to work.
- evilpotatoes 6y ago
  The criticism would need to be constructive to be useful, or at least specific enough to act on. Also, you can't go embarrassing the parent company, especially one as image-conscious as google.
  - the_duke 6y ago
    Any kind of public criticism is embarrassing from a PR perspective. Either you accept that, or you don't. "Ethics researches" that can't publish public criticism , with minimal oversight restricted to preventing IP leaks, are a pointless exercise in fake responsibility posturing.
    - bitcurious 6y ago
      Agree to disagree. One of the main “enforcement arms” of ethics research is to say the unsaid things out loud. Saying them introduces legal liability onto the company in future lawsuits. I.e. “Google knew that X would result in Y and they still released X; they should pay for the damages of Y.” The PR side of ethics research barely matters in comparison.

prepend 6y ago

I wish ACM would act ethically in regards to SciHub.

finnthehuman 6y ago
>For the avoidance of doubt, an example of a site ACM authors may post all versions of their work to, with the exception of the final published "Version of Record", is ArXiv. >Examples of sites ACM authors may not post their work to are ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Mendeley, or Sci-Hub, as these sites are all either commercial or in some instances utilize predatory practices that violate copyright https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess Not exactly an onerous policy, nor one that makes content hard to obtain.
- Clewza313 6y ago
  Ah, the sweet irony of accusing a free distributor of academic papers of "predatory practices", as opposed to the bloodsucking leeches at Elsevier & co.
- prepend 6y ago
  They take sponsorship from for profit journals and that’s way worse for their field than anything Google does. I find them hypocritical for cancelling this one sponsorship for “ethical” reasons but not addressing the actual problem that is the relationship of their professional society and for profit publishing.

geswit2x 6y ago

It's ironic how one of the biggest ban-hammers on earth got banned

ReptileMan 6y ago

Since google doesn't need ethicists but vice versa I think they will be fine after this crushing blow.

gambler 6y ago

Google's push to participate in AI ethics discussions has always been about controlling the narrative. The fact that it took them firing two people for ACM to notice is rather hilarious. Just read the papers they promote. The meta-narrative is rather clear. They want to present AI/ML as something that is dangerous in the hands of individuals or smaller companies and that requires constant and direct control from experts with tons of data and resources. So they're perfectly happy to talk about stuff like model bias, but the moment you start asking uncomfortable questions about ML in general you better watch out. These topics should be handled by people without corporate ties. Period. The conflict of interests is so in-your-face, it's mind-boggling more people don't speak about it.

tiahura 6y ago

This will further marginalize AI ethics and can only be seen as a good thing. NPR did yet another piece on the topic last weekend and interviewed an AI ethics expert. When, once again, I’m being told that the reason a system has a hard time identifying the features of black faces is systemic racism, and doesn’t even mention the optic and sensor issues, I think the field needs a reboot.

nerdponx 6y ago
It is precisely systemic racism. People who do not have dark skin make a system. It turns out that the system performs poorly on people with dark skin, and possibly causes discriminatory outcomes. Perhaps the training data didn't have enough dark-skinned people. Or perhaps the optics and sensors didn't work well. The point is that the outcome is biased against a certain group of people, and it's (edit: partly) because that affected group of people lacks representation in the group of people developing the system (edit: , because if they were represented they would have flagged the issue and it would have all been presented and handled differently). No, it does not imply that the individual researchers are racist as such.
- sprayk 6y ago
  Is there a way to prove that it is not caused by systemic racism? Having some unfalsifiable quality is pretty useless, and if it is the sort of thing that's never meant to end then that feels more like religion.
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    It would depend on the details of the particular situation (was there a specific news story associated with the GP?), but you'd have to show that people with the skin color in question signed off on the product. It's one thing if you produce a new model and present it at a conference, and one of the conclusion of your paper is that "this model does great on light-skinned faces but performs poorly on dark-skinned faces, we need to make improvements in optics and low-light sensing to bring up the accuracy on dark-skinned people." That's not racist, that's doing science. It's another if you are a for-profit image recognition company, or if you otherwise deploy that model in production without so much as checking to see if your model generalized well to dark-skinned faces, or without attempting to add some post-hoc bias correction, etc. We are currently in a world where the latter happens quite often. It's not just a race thing; there all kinds of inadequate "AI" systems being pushed on people that don't really work as advertised, to the detriment of some group or another (sometimes to everyone). But when it becomes a race thing, it's especially distressing to a lot of people, because Europe and the USA have long and grim histories of racism that extend up to and including the present day.

ThePowerOfFuet 6y ago

So I have to accept all of Heise's cookies or I have to pay? Wow. Heise had a better reputation than that in my mind.

croes 6y ago
It's even worse. The new cookie banner reads "USA Consent: By clicking on "Accept", you consent to your data being processed by providers in the USA in accordance with Art. 49 (1) DSGVO. The USA is considered to be a country with an insufficient level of data protection according to EU standards. There is a risk that your data may also be passed on to US authorities."

motohagiography 6y ago

I've written here once before that AI ethics researchers are like hiring hackers working in security, where they hold your products to an exogenous standard or ideal, which can add value, but has risks. I've worked for companies who hired and then had to fire hackers for publishing vulnerabilities in their own and in customer products. Security is fundamentally a technology governance function, and AI ethics piece is also a technology governance function, where both hackers and AI ethics researchers are in-effect activists to create awareness for change, but aren't typically who you would put in the actual governance role. An AI ethics conference has analogies to Defcon or Blackhat, in that shunning vendors because the attendees perceived that some prominent hackers were treated unfairly may have some precedents. Microsoft's relationship with Defcon in the 90's vs. post 2000 is an example of how this both happened and changed. Extending that analogy, the disconnect in the relationship between researchers and vendors was a symptom of what a disadvantage the vendors were at to the asymmetric risk that activists/hackers posed because the media story of the conflict between giant corporations being vulnerable to scrappy hackers writes itself. In terms of how to handle it, google can probably use precedents from MSFT vs. defcon, and AI ethics researchers can look at how hackers both succeeded and failed to change security and tech governance.

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jcims 6y ago
>I've written here once before that AI ethics researchers are like hiring hackers working in security Exactly, PoC or GTFO! (i'll be here all week...) (edit: maybe)
higerordermap 6y ago
Except these "Ethics" researchers don't have the same level of skills. And involve in virtue signalling.
- motohagiography 6y ago
  I think it's worth addressing this even if it's going to get flagged. Hacker skills are a really long tailed distribution and the best are brilliant, the worst are just riding coattails. The ability to form an opinion about the implementation scope of a given variable for one of the many complicated functions required in ML puts you in some pretty rare air. I work in security, where I need the breadth to argue the merits of the entropy of a diversification component or the choice of an elliptic curve in a protocol design and balance it with state level attackers - and regulatory policy and legislation, with the tedious compliance aspects as a theme. The shape of the skills is weird. Where you need breadth first in a lot of areas, and depth first in ones that are not valuable outside very limited contexts. I can't vouch for where on the long tail the people involved in this controversy might be, but I don't like the odds on being dismissive of them.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

This title is confusing in English. It makes it sound like Google is the entity that made the decision not to sponsor, instead of the conference organizers. A better title would be "AI ethics conference organizers no longer want Google as sponsors".

tantalor 6y ago
It's confusing because passive voice is used.
- Tomte 6y ago
  No, it's confusing, because the sentence (which isn't actually in the passive voice) is word-by-word identical to another sentence, but with with a totally different meaning. So that many people will parse it as the other sentence. (The German sentence doesn't have that ambiguity)
  - imagine99 6y ago
    I believe whoever changed the headline to this abomination doesn't understand any German - or it was done automatically by something like GPT-3 (wouldn't put it past HN ;-)). Why? Because it's the exact result that Google Translator spits out if you translate the original page in Chrome ("Google no longer wanted to sponsor the AI ethics conference"). That's of course just plain incorrect on several levels. I put a lot of effort into finding a suitable and exact translation when I originally submitted it but apparently we are now at the point where well-thought-through and correct work can simply be erased and overwritten with the result of a stupid Google AI. How fitting for this topic ;-))
    - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
      It's not really "incorrect", it's just ambiguous to the point that an average native English speaker would interpret it incorrectly. The problem is the word "wanted" in that sentence can either signify present tense passive voice (e.g. "Google (is) no longer wanted to sponsor..."), which is actually the desired interpretation here, or past tense active voice (which is how I think most native speakers would interpret it).

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nullifidian 6y ago

Considering that "AI ethics" basically means we shouldn't have AI until we can guarantee that AI doesn't commit thought crimes(according to the current groupthink morality prevalent among the educated class), it's not surprising.

ausbah 6y ago
that's disingenuous at best. AI systems are already deployed in the judicial system, surveillance systems, healthcare, and who knows how many other domains that effect people's lives - with many instances to suggest that a large % of systems treat people differently along undesirable features like race or gender due to encoding negative biases or whatever the cause may be

refraincomment 6y ago

Hopefully nobody writes Google and ethics together again

dt123 6y ago

one for /r/nottheonion

purerandomness 6y ago

The title is misleading. It's confusing because the German original title make clear that ACM does not want Google to be a sponsor anymore, whereas the English title adds the possibility that it might be Google who wanted to sponsor the conference, but then decided not to.

shitpostbot 6y ago

At the risk of sounding "euphoric", it always felt to me that most of the "AI ethics" field was just hacks trying to hitch their wagon to a fast growing field without needing the discriminating credentials. At least from time to time I would have liked to see an article or two about how it would be unethical to allow humans to do something that AI was better at. Instead it's all FUD about creating a complex framework for evaluating who self driving cars should choose to kill in emergencies, when the obvious answer from an engineering perspective is to just hit the brakes. I can imagine Google was getting tired of paying out the nose for what was mostly drivel

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perryizgr8 6y ago

What's the value of an AI ethics conference if the largest AI powerhouse is not allowed to take part?

naebother 6y ago

Good. Imagining a world where Lockheed no longer wants to sponsor the cluster-munitions ethics conference and that's viewed as a negative.

rexreed 6y ago
Now that sounds like a fun conference to attend. I'd be curious about the positive impacts of cluster munitions, altho I'd be hard pressed to find any. I would imagine an ethics conference on this topic would have one session: "do not use".
- ausbah 6y ago
  "build bigger cluster munitions to deter our enemies"?

Nimitz14 6y ago

This is an ambiguous, and therefore bad, title.

kelvin0 6y ago

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Bluestein 6y ago

Big G sponsoring an AI ethics conference would be like Bonnie Parker sponsoring an ethical banking committee ...

Bluestein 6y ago
(Apparently somebody -did- remember who Parker was :)
- Bluestein 6y ago
  I suffer silently the wrath of the big G! Shall I compare them to the Bonnie and Clyde due their ethical struggling for AI? Big G can do no evil, plain as that their critics only will avail squat.- (... or down votes, apparently :) While Parkers in the end got their due trap Our every browse does big G still now track Who am I meager I to claim that G cannot do evil, but lone evil be? As father time allowed for a short while that Bonnie and Clyde their banking tryst did hide now does the G control our searches all But not with evil! No! how dare we call! An ethical conundrum fore us lies Is big G fit to master our AIs? There's only one big G, I need not tell. The rest of them can burn wholesale in ...

dang 6y ago

I've changed the URL from https://www.heise.de/news/Google-als-Sponsor-fuer-KI-Ethik-Konferenz-nicht-mehr-erwuenscht-5070341.html https://www.heise.de/news/Google-als-Sponsor-fuer-KI-Ethik-K... to which seems to be the main 3rd party article on this in English. Submissions to HN need to be in English. We have deep respect for German and other languages, but HN is an English-language site. It's important that the community be able to read an article. When people can't read an article they react purely to the title, which leads to shallower discussion. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=english%20language%20site%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... I've also changed the title from "Google no longer wanted to sponsor the AI ethics conference", which unless my rudimentary German is betraying me, actually is not what the heise.de headline says. If I understand the story correctly, it's the conference that didn't want Google.

g42gregory 6y ago

In other news, Google suspends indexing of the said AI ethics research conference, so that no one knows about it.