Listening to The Economist Morning Briefing this past Saturday I heard mention of Margaret Mitchell being fired from Google. Mitchell was the former head of the Ethical AI team at Google.
Why it’s interesting
Artificial Intelligence news is usually limited to hype or marketing claims about the latest technology. I’d seen Mitchell Tweet about this the previous day, and to my knowledge there was no other media coverage or attention. This however is the first time I’ve seen our colleagues in our niche fields or topics like AI in the Economist, fittingly in their Morning Briefing, distributed to smart speakers.
Why we care
Conway’s Law observes “organizations design systems which mirror their own communication structure”.
Mitchell, who Google claims was fired for code of conduct violations, was an outspoken advocate of Timnit Gebru’s, who Google claims was fired for policy violations. Gebru’s research has discussed how bias is encoded in large AI models for language and image recognition. A recent paper also identified the intensive energy use in building and running huge AI models.
It’s hard for me not to connect this with the other recent news of a person hired by the company to create a program addressing bias being fired after she was outspoken about bias. After Gebru’s firing, April Curley announced on Twitter that she’d been fired in September. Curley, a diversity recruiter, was hired to head Google’s initiatives to boost recruitment from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
It’s more difficult for me, re: Conway, to avoid noting they’re all women, two of them women of color hired to help address bias within Google’s technologies and internal policies. I’m an AI designer, and all of my professional work was within and for large technology companies.
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