Can I postulate that the problem with these kind of positions goes even deeper? Let's say we had a wonderful company which would create an unimpeachable ethics board and which enthusiastically endorsed the findings of said board. This is good for today but what about tomorrow? What about when the company comes up with a promising product which violates one of those ethics? What happens when the companies stock stagnates? What happens when the company is in financial trouble? What happens when the company is coming up with promising new products every day for years that could get it out of that financial trouble? What happens when ethnically minded managers have to argue day in and day out that we should let the company fail rather than dain to implement one of these profitable products which violates just a few of these ethics? Eventually, some combination of desperation and profit motive will break the damn.

And often it is a damn that need only break once. Corporate ethics as a whole seems contradictory. The only ethical rules which a company may obey in perpetuity are those that do not for long conflict with profit and those which are backed by effective laws.

Even when done with a positive intent, I fear creating positions such as this is begging for eventual corruption.

To her defense, she was working on ethics in AI. What ethics to adopt inherently comes down to ideology.

While I don't really understand the emissions argument, the rest strikes me as very defensible. If the best language models need giant datasets to excel, it is very difficult to ensure your AI is trained on reasonable data.

I wouldn't want an AI therapist to be trained on 4chan. Now obviously nobody would be that stupid, but unfortunately it seems we are not far from it.

Unless we build models that rely on less data, it will be difficult to prevent problematic biases in the AI we put into production.

If that is the argument Timnit makes, I think that's the exact type of work I would expect from an AI ethics department. And good work at that.

You train your LM on web crawl data, but also train a 4chan classifier, then you condition your LM not to generate in 4chan style. GPT-3 got a similar chaperone classifier for offensive speech. It's like knowing swear words but choosing not to use them. You could also condition a general LM to bias and debias its outputs as you like.

She didn’t “refuse to fix it when asked”. She agreed with the proviso that she could have a meeting to figure out what she was and was not permitted to publish.

The response was to decline to meet and fire her.

It’s entirely plausible that the paper is bunk; however, when someone is willing to come down that hard to prevent an idea being published, I tend to err on the side of “worth finding out what”.

> She didn’t “refuse to fix it when asked”. She agreed with the proviso that she could have a meeting to figure out what she was and was not permitted to publish.

I think that is in dispute. Jeff Dean claims she did refuse to fix it.

> It’s entirely plausible that the paper is bunk; however, when someone is willing to come down that hard to prevent an idea being published, I tend to err on the side of “worth finding out what”

But they weren't trying to prevent the idea from being published. They certainly knew by firing her they'd give it far more attention than it would otherwise get. What they wanted was not to put their name on this idea.

That's one interpretation of her demands. Mine is that she was preparing to shame the "privileged white men" who were blocking her.

https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331757629996109824

> She didn’t “refuse to fix it when asked”. She agreed with the proviso that she ...

Are you sure she agreed to fix it? According to her tweets she agreed to take her name off the paper, not to fix it, and only if they agreed to her conditions which included releasing the names of all the reviewers involved. From Jeff Dean's email:

> ... 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

If I was in their position, I would be extremely uncomfortable releasing the names of the reviewers with the likely result that they would be doxxed by Gebru on Twitter

She wasn't fired, she offered her resignation.

She offered “to work on an end date”. Whether that counts as a resignation or not is likely to be a matter for the NLRB.

Suppose your girlfriend announced she was working on an end date, how would you feel?

I'd fire her in response, it's still a firing.

This technicality matters for unemployment and COBRA, and it has a concrete definition.

This is not a discussion about the technicalities, I am sure you are aware.

For any application of meaningful size, "science and technology" cannot be divorced from "ideology and politics".

I'm not blaming you solely but the recurring idea that it can is worrying.

Well, she did Research while Google expected a PR piece. And it's obvious she couldn't fulfill Google's expectations, as the whole point of an ethics committee is to be critical, not just doing rubber-stamping.

Ethics is inherently "PR, ideology, and politics" since the ethicist has to select a set of foundational moral principles to work off of but that set won't be universally shared by everyone.