"She's someone who has, at great cost to herself, persisted in identifying, publicizing and trying to remediate a lot of the issues that arise with the use of intelligent technologies."Ī number of people on her own team and others within Google tweeted their support for Gebru and anger with their employer. "If we have heroes in the AI ethics community, she's one of those heroes," said Susan Etlinger, an AI expert at the Altimeter Group. Shortly before she tweeted that she had been fired, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint that said Google had violated labor laws by spying on and then firing workers who were organizing employee protests.
Gebru is also well-liked for supporting activism within Google and defending employees who've lost their jobs because of their protests. Not only does Timnit encapsulate our hopes and dreams, and is the embodiment of the best of us, but she is strongly supported," said Mutale Nkonde, the CEO of AI for the People and a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center. Gebru is best known for her research on discrimination within facial recognition models, including a groundbreaking study that illustrated gender and skin-type bias in the best commercial AI facial recognition systems at the time. In the email explaining her termination shared by Gebru, Google Research Vice President Megan Kacholia wrote that Gebru's email to the Listserv was "inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager." Google declined to comment. Over the last week, Gebru had been fighting to have the research paper - which discusses the ethics issues of large language models - published with her and other Google employees' names.Īfter Gebru said that she would plan to resign if Google didn't commit to further discussion about the company's demands over the research paper, Google immediately rejected her conditions and terminated her employment without discussion, according to Gebru's statement. Timnit Gebru, the now-former technical co-lead for Google's AI ethics team, said that she was forced out of Google because of an email she sent to members of the Google Brain Women and Allies Listserv that detailed her frustration with the company's diversity pledges and the exhausting experience of being a Black woman at Google, as well as conflict over an ethics research paper that Google wanted retracted. After Google fired one of the industry's most respected and well-loved AI ethics researchers on Wednesday, Google employees and tech industry leaders alike voiced their fear that her firing will have a "chilling effect" on ethics research within tech companies and at Google specifically.
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