Tutorial 5 - Google AI Ethics
Summary
In December 2020, Timnit Gebru – computer scientist and co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team at Google – was fired after Google managers asked her to either retract her latest research paper or to remove her name from it, along with those of other members of the team who had contributed to the research. The paper in question, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?”, was an overview of the environmental, financial, and social costs of large language models such as GPT-3. Google’s managers deemed the paper unpublishable but did not reveal how the internal review process they had come to this decision. Google claimed that Gebru had offered to resign and that her resignation had been accepted. In February 2021, Google fired the co-lead of the ethical AI team (and co-author of the paper), Margaret Mitchell, claiming that she had violated the company’s code of conduct. Google’s employees, who had previously protested the company’s collaboration with US Custom and Border Protection, the US Department of Defense, the Chinese state surveillance project Dragonfly, and had denounced Google’s handling of sexual harassment, demanded that Google provide clear guidelines on how research is reviewed and how research integrity is respected.
Core Readings
Hao, K. (2020, December 4). We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says. The MIT Technology Review.
Simonite, T. (2021, August 6). What really happened when Google ousted Timnit Gebru.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-timnit-gebru-ai-what-really-happened/
(2021, February 20). Google fires Margaret Mitchell, another top researcher on its AI ethics team.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/19/google-fires-margaret-mitchell-ai-ethics-team
Prompts
Each subgroup should discuss one of these prompts (with the letter matching your subgroup letter) before the tutorial.
D) How would you define ‘ethics’ on an individual, organisational, and social level? What should be the relationship between these levels?
A) How does organisational culture affect the ways in which ethical research and development are conducted?
B) How can power structures within the organisation shape ethical research?
C) What do you think should be the relationship between an ethics team and the rest of the organisation?