Outcry is growing within Google over the treatment of the AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru, with Gebru’s colleagues challenging the company’s account of her exit in an open letter.
In a letter posted on Monday on Medium, Gebru’s colleagues disputed an executive’s claim that she had resigned and called internal research policies into question.
“Dr Gebru did not resign, despite what Jeff Dean (Senior Vice President and head of Google Research), has publicly stated,” the letter reads before going into detail about the events that led to Gebru’s dismissal.
Gebru, a Black female scientist who is highly respected in her field, said on Twitter last week that she had been fired after sending an email to an internal company group for women and allies, expressing frustration over discrimination at Google and a dispute over one of her papers that was retracted after initially being approved for publication.
The paper in question examined the ethical issues associated with AI language technology and reportedly mentions Google’s own software, which is important to the company’s business model development.
In a statement issued on Friday, Dean reiterated the company’s position that Gebru had resigned and detailed the company’s research and review process, which he said required two weeks. Gebru’s paper, he said, was submitted a day before its deadline.
On Monday, Gebru’s team rejected his argument, arguing that close to half of all papers are submitted within a day or less notice. “So it is clear that this is a standard which was applied unevenly and discriminatorily,” they wrote in the letter.
The paper also received approval from Gebru’s manager, Samy Bengio, who said he was “stunned” by her dismissal in a public post on Facebook.
If everything was so above board, if pulling the paper was really over a procedural issue - why wasn’t @timnitGebru’s manager looped in? Why isn’t Samy buying it? This is only the latest in a litany of ways the cover story has fallen apart. #ISupportTimnit #BelieveBlackWomen https://t.co/mhEIJ4M2tU pic.twitter.com/RRpFSDQxYA
— Google Walkout For Real Change (@GoogleWalkout) December 6, 2020
Margaret Mitchell, Gebru’s co-lead on the Google Ethical AI Team, also publicly came to her defense, posting rebuttals to each of Dean’s claims on why the paper was not up to internal standards and challenging the policy itself for leading to scientific censorship. “I believe that I am obligated to speak up when my employer publicly belittles me and/or my colleagues’ scholarship,” she wrote.
The letter follows a petition of solidarity with Gebru published last week that accuses the company of “unprecedented research censorship”, racism and her retaliatory firing. The petition, which includes demands for transparency about decisions leading to the paper’s retraction and Gebru’s termination and an “unequivocal commitment to research integrity and academic freedom”, has now been signed by more than 1,800 Google employees – including some in director positions – and 2,650 academic, industry, and civil society supporters.
“Research integrity can no longer be taken for granted in Google’s corporate research environment, and Dr Gebru’s firing has overthrown a working understanding of what kind of research Google will permit,” the petitioners wrote. ”
Concerns about discrimination at Google have grown since thousands of employees around the world staged walkouts to protest against sexual harassment and systemic racism in November 2018. In a complaint filed by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) last week, the company was accused of unlawfully surveilling and firing workers who organized protests.
But Gebru’s exit also raises questions over the potential for the company to censor science with internal review policies. AI researchers are calling for scientists to stop reviewing Google papers and for academic conferences to stop including research published by the company.
“I can’t even begin to imagine what interference people at Google have experienced in the past, are experiencing now, or will experience going forward,” Ali Alkhatib, a research fellow at the University of San Francisco’s Center for Applied Data Ethics, wrote on his blog on Sunday, questioning the policies outlined in Dean’s statement. “I can’t be confident that any radical recommendation a paper makes hasn’t been carefully pruned by someone at Google who may have actively threatened to ‘resignate’ the author if they didn’t go along with it.”