Former Google AI ethicist Timnit Gebru says she was asked to retract her paper

The paper was co-authored by former Google ai ethicist timnit gebru. The paper also questioned the environmental costs and biases in large language models.

Search is a highly lucrative segment of Google’s business. In the third quarter of this year alone, it brought in revenue of $ 26.3 billion.

Gebru and her team submitted their paper, titled’on the dangers of stochastic parrots: can language models be too big?’. She says she was asked to retract the paper or remove Google employees’ names from it.

The head of Google AI, Jeff Dean, wrote in an email to employees that the paper’did n’t meet our bar for publication’. gebru’s conditions for continuing to work at Google was for the company to tell her who had reviewed the paper and their specific feedback, which it declined to do.

Dean Dean Dean wrote that the paper’ignored too much relevant research’. The paper’s co-author Emily M. Bender said the paper was’the sort of work that no individual or even pair of authors can pull off’.

Gebru is known for her work on algorithmic bias, especially in facial recognition technology. She co-authored a paper with joy buolamwini that showed error rates for identifying darker-skinned people were much higher than the error rates used to train algorithms were overwhelmingly white.

Gebru told wired in an interview that she felt she was being censored.’you’re not going to have papers that make the company happy all the time and do n’t point out problems,’ she said.

More than 1,500 Google employees have signed a letter of protest. The petition, titled standing with Dr. timnit gebru, was the co-lead of ethical artificial intelligence team at Google.

‘we call on Google research to strengthen its commitment to research integrity and to unequivocally commit to supporting research that honors the commitments made in Google’s ai principles’.

The petitioners are demanding that Dean and others involved with the decision to censor Dr. gebru’s paper. They want to explain the process by which the paper was unilaterally rejected by leadership.