This is akin to a speech writer working for a politician, writing a piece that disagrees with the party platform, and refusing to fix it when asked.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
This technicality matters for unemployment and COBRA, and it has a concrete definition.
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
I'm not blaming you solely but the recurring idea that it can is worrying.