For example this article says the following: "Members of Google’s Ethical AI team sent additional demands to Pichai, calling for policy changes, among other things.". If you look at these demands it includes the following:
* The dismissal of the company vice president.
* The reinstatement of Gebru at a higher level than she previously had.
The question as to whether these demands are ethical is not clear at all to me.
Another case in point, anecdotally I saw this a lot at the place I used to work, was the call for regulation to control AI research, and indeed this article talks about this in the section: "Scrap self-regulation". Taken from a different political perspective, someone might argue that giving more control to the state for the purpose of pursuing legitimised violence against AI researchers is unethical (note this is not my view it is an example). I saw people air views like this in the ethics discussions and given very unfavourable treatment, bordering on unethical.
It would be great if AI ethics was a field that produced solutions to problems such as verified datasets, best codes of practice and testing tools. Instead it just seems to be a way to highlight issues and advocate for political positions, which isn't in itself worthless but it feels like the first step in what should be a journey. Unfortunately highlighting problems is really easy, fixing them is the challenging part.
I often got the feeling that the people interested in this just cared about directing the labour of other people for their own interests, e.g. leading from behind rather than leading from the front. All seemed rather unethical to me.