Researchers Demand That Google Rehire And Promote Timnit Gebru After Firing : NPR - 0 views
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Members of a prestigious research unit at Google have sent a letter to the company's chief executive demanding that ousted artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru be reinstated.
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Gebru, who studies the ethics of AI and was one of the only Black research scientists at Google, says she was unexpectedly fired after a dispute over an academic paper and months of speaking out about the need for more women and people of color at the tech giant.
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"Offering Timnit her position back at a higher level would go a long way to help re-establish trust and rebuild our team environment,"
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Since Gebru's termination earlier this month, more than 2,600 Googlers have signed an open letter expressing dismay over the way Gebru exited the company and asking executives for a full explanation of what prompted her dismissal.
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Google has maintained that Gebru resigned, though Gebru herself says she never voluntary agreed to leave the company.
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They say Jeff Dean, senior vice president of Google Research, and other executives involved in Gebru's firing need to be held accountable.
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Gebru helped establish Black in AI, a group that supports Black researchers in the field of artificial intelligence.
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At Google, Gebru's former team wrote in the Wednesday letter that studying ways to reduce the harm of AI on marginalized groups is key to their mission.
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Last month, Google abruptly asked Gebru to retract a research paper focused on the potential biases baked into an AI system that attempts to mimic human speech. The technology helps power Google's search engine. Google claims that the paper did not meet its bar for publication and that Gebru did not follow the company's internal review protocol.
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However, Gebru and her supporters counter that she was being targeted because of how outspoken she was about diversity issues, a theme that was underscored in the letter.
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The letter says Google's top brass have committed to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion among its research units, but unless more concrete and immediate action is taken, those promises are "virtue signaling; they are damaging, evasive, defensive and demonstrate leadership's inability to understand how our organization is part of the problem," according to the letter.
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She also was the co-author of pioneering research into facial recognition technology that demonstrated how people of color and women are misidentified far more often than white faces. The study helped persuade IBM, Amazon and Microsoft to stop selling the technology to law enforcement.
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Google has a history of striking back against employees who agitate internally for change. Organizers of the worldwide walkouts at Google in 2018 over sexual harassment and other issues were fired by the company. And more recently, the National Labor Relation Board accused Google of illegally firing workers who were involved in union organizing.