I really never understood this whole Gebru situation and it sounds like there is bad behavior on both sides.
The bad behavior by Google is pretty well available online.
Yet no one is talking about the fact that they hired Gebru to make these changes. All it seems they asked from her was not publicly slander the company that was paying her to do exactly what she wanted. Then Google claims she quit which should be provable and she claims she was fired which also should be provable. Yet I've seen no proof of either.
> Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google
So she quit then and this is a non issue. It rarely goes in favor of anyone when they give an ultimatum to the company that employed them or they will quit. The very act of doing so has basically proven is incapable of working with the company or doing the job she was hired to do.
I'm no fan of Google so whatever knocks them down is fine with me.
I'm not sure what you are not clear on here. If someone says I quit/resign then they quit period, they were not fired. The two weeks period is just to prevent unemployment fraud.
So if you say I will find another job if the company doesn’t take action like... pay me more, agree to union terms, stop my manager from harassing me, or stop what I think is an unethical abuse of the public... then I am defacto quitting?
In that case how can an employee have a negotiation with a company at all? The power to refuse working is literally the only power the employee has at the negotiation.
Isn't it standard for quitting senior employees to be paid to sit at home on their notice period? It seems like a bad idea for someone leaving to retain their systems access for 2 weeks... That's Google right really, so unless her last pay cheque was short 2 weeks money, she quit and "worked" her notice from home.
Gebru: I have concerns that I'd like addressed that are important enough to me that I would quit over them, we can talk about it in more depth when I get back from my previously scheduled vacation.
Google: Don't bother coming back, you're no longer an employee.
Just like a threat to fire someone isn't actually firing someone, a threat to quit isn't actually quitting.
Her demands were quite specific and she did list a date.
I'm happy enough to say it's not clear cut quitting. But what's the difference really? She didn't want to stay, they didn't want her to stay, beyond that it's like a couple asking who dumped who.
I probably should have said "leaving employees" in my comment above...
Fact is any company will ever be as good as their executives. People are people, so there's no reason to believe in magic fairy tales. From outside this looks like manager panic, on both sides.
I don't agree that setting a date makes it a firing. If someone is looking to leave soon, there may be cause not to involve them in confidential company plans. It's a risk to take with little benefit.
The problem here is that “criticizing ethical biases in a company’s core AI technology” is pretty much what an “ethical AI” group is supposed to do, even if it conflicts with the company’s profit-making imperative. Once Google started drawing lines around what technologies it was politically-correct to criticize (or, perhaps, “slander”), that group simply became part of PR and marketing. And that’s fine! But academic journals should treat that as a conflict of interest when reviewing or editing papers from that group, and academic “ethical AI” folks are probably not going to want to work there, because it’s definitely not a disinterested actor at that point. (The “quit vs fired” issue basically comes down to an interpretation of whether Google could “short circuit” an ultimatum and go right to “accepting an implicitly-offered resignation.” That’s … a fine point of labor law, and probably one not easily solved short of litigation.)
Let’s say a company hired safety inspectors, and the inspectors found legitimate safety issues which would be expensive to fix. If the company fired the inspectors would you really be so pithy about for-profit enterprise? Likewise if a software company hired software security specialists who discovered severe bugs in their flagship product. Or if Bell Labs fired a physicist who discovered a flaw in transistor design.
It’s really no different with ethics. Gebru was hired by Google to study issues of ethics in AI. That was her literal job description. She was not hired to put a positive spin on Google’s business. She was hired as an objective researcher.
I seriously doubt you would actually defend the idea that (say) private-sector scientists or mathematicians should be expected to toe the company line even if they have a legitimate scientific objection: this attitude would be a disaster for the company in the long term, even if “ignore all bad news from the nerds” means they might make more profit in the short term.
I think there's still a portion of people who believe (or at least want to believe) Google's old "do no evil" mantra. You're right in the general sense, but for a time it seemed like Google might buck the trend a little.
You cannot make changes while cutting off your own hands. The fact that Google made the step to try to change their AI practices by hiring her in the first place was a huge risk to them. Then all they ask was not to ruin the business and she went all nuclear option and ran to the press about it.
As I see it at this point, her inability to navigate the politics of the situation showed she was incapable of doing the job anyway. She should have been highlighting her presence and recruiting people that believed in the cause. Instead she upended the table and left the second there was some friction between her and business interests.
If the bad behavior of Gebru is not available online, what makes you think there was bad behavior on both sides? Why even make that judgement without information?
Screaming off the mountain tops is not the act of a good solid person that is trying to make meaningful change. Not to mention they asked her to take her name off (bad) but if she was interested in change rather than her own personal interests it was not a huge sacrifice. She was already given a position at one of the largest companies in the world for AI to try to make meaningful change. Instead she chose to make a spectacle.
Gebru has not been forthcoming with information about what exactly she did in this situation behind the scenes. She has privacy and HR laws protecting her in ways Google does not. It is up to her to release the information and she has not.
The word I've heard on the street is that her paper passed the normal internal peer review process at Google (which is open wrt to the reviewers' identities) and was then hit with a second, just for her and her paper review process that had secret identities and made ultimatums that the paper simply wouldn't allowed to be published based on it's content, even with edits.
I'd be pissed in those circumstances too, seeing it as an affront to the academic process in general, and be looking at the obvious reasons why they chose me and my paper to apply these previously unheard of constraints to.
The only valid point of contention here is the demanding removal of her name on the paper.
My game theory'ish take on the demands.
Gebru
1.The demands were reasonable so she herself should have no issue sharing them. Vindicates her position against Google and proves herself and her theories correct, scoring a huge victory for her AI research.
2.Even she know her demands were so ridiculous she is not comfortable sharing them.
Option one has not happened so that leaves two. Google really has no good outcome in sharing them it could be considered all variety of violations HR so they likely never will without her permission.
> The only valid point of contention here is the demanding removal of her name on the paper.
My understanding is that the review required a full retraction of the paper so that it wouldn't be published, not just removing her name.
And your game theory view leaves out that she's in the middle of a lawsuit now, and the first thing her lawyer would have said is to stop talking publicly.
The bad behavior by Google is pretty well available online.
Yet no one is talking about the fact that they hired Gebru to make these changes. All it seems they asked from her was not publicly slander the company that was paying her to do exactly what she wanted. Then Google claims she quit which should be provable and she claims she was fired which also should be provable. Yet I've seen no proof of either.