AI ethics research conference suspends Google sponsorship

https://venturebeat.com/2021/03/02/ai-ethics-research-conference-suspends-google-sponsorship/

by imagine99 • 5 years ago

293 245 5 years ago

venturebeat.com

rubenfiszel• 5 years ago

Bold move from ACM but good for them!

loa_in_• 5 years ago

Google had it coming when they supported autonomous warfare AI

eqvinox3• 5 years ago

Well, there's at least 2 perspectives here.

If the two people were fired due to race, gender, or even ethical opinion, this reaction is more than appropriate.

If the two people were fired due to breaking established rules and processes, exfiltrating files or similar — this can very well backfire on minorities. It indirectly creates another hurdle to hiring a minority member if the company needs to consider that they can't viably fire them for breaking rules.

I'm unaware of good public information supporting either perspective. And both the ex-employees and Google may be restricted from publishing sensitive information to support their cause. I'm not sure how to form an informed opinion on this, honestly.

probably_wrong• 5 years ago

I'm not following your second perspective.

If I read you comment correctly, your second perspective would be "Gebru and Mitchell were fired with good cause, but people are rushing to their defense only because they are members of a minority".

If that's what you meant, I would counterargue: I haven't seen anything in this saga that implies anything of the sort. Simplified, it is my understanding that people either defend the firing claiming that Gebru and Mitchell acted in bad faith or object to it claiming that their only fault was speaking the truth back to Google (who hired them to do so).

panic2• 5 years ago

The idea of something “backfiring on minorities” as an entire group is part of the problem here. The fact that there was a backlash after someone was fired can’t be used as a justification for not hiring other people whose only relationship to the original person is “also some kind of minority”.

Causality1• 5 years ago

Legally, no. From a practical standpoint, people do whatever they think they can get away with.

eqvinox3• 5 years ago

Of course it's part of the problem. But it's also a somewhat unavoidable side effect of supporting minorities.

In a very weird way, anti-discriminative behaviour itself needs to be discriminative, because it needs to support minorities. And rightfully so, there needs to be a positive bias for minorities who were historically disenfranchised. Otherwise the historical disadvantage will propagate itself further. But then when you look at firings like this, it becomes very hard to distinguish whether it's discrimination or rightful. These two are members of minority groups. Their firing is, rightfully, examined to fine detail. But that same magnification lens has that chilling effect for the decision of hiring minority members.

It's really a have-your-cake-and-eat-it problem. It f_cking sucks. And I don't know how to do better. I absolutely think we need affirmative action to relieve historic deficits, but at the same time this affirmative support is in itself discriminatory and can have negative effects. What to do? :(

SpicyLemonZest5• 5 years ago

I don’t think this is an example of “can’t viably be fired”. They don’t seem to be saying Google or its employees are banned from the conference; they just don’t want Google’s money. (And Gebru used to be on the executive committee for this conference, so it can’t be a surprise to Google that they might be on her side.)

eqvinox3• 5 years ago

I wish you were right, but IMHO you need to take the devil's (racist's) advocate position here. Even an average not-really-racist but-slightly-prejudiced ("non-woke") HR manager can look at this and go "oh, Google got f_cked so hard for firing these two minority members... I really don't want to possibly end up in that situation"... and, even if that's certainly discriminatory thinking, it's not "wrong" on the pure logical level. And even worse, it's unlikely to be noticed and very hard to fight. The decision not to hire someone won't come with an explainer why, and proving discriminatory practice there is quite hard.

... and the HR manager may even do this subconsciously! In that case noone is even aware discrimination is happening. (Which is why blanking applications is so important!)

geofft• 5 years ago

It is, unfortunately, a pretty common thing in our society to have rules that are selectively enforced. How often did the NYPD stop-and-frisk a trader walking down Wall Street?

In that case, the pressure isn't so much "don't hire minorities" as "don't be more stringent about enforcing your established rules and processes on certain groups of people," which is a great pressure.

Gebru has spoken publicly about the allegation that she broke processes. See this thread: https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1335017526112227329

Notably, the official description of the process includes the sentence, "There is no such thing as the perfect policy. Fortunately Googlers like to do the right thing. Please do that here—read the policy and do what makes sense."

pmontra• 5 years ago

Google translation of the original German text:

Google is not allowed to sponsor the Conference of Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) this year. This has been announced by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The reason for this is the dismissal of two AI researchers and allegations of racism. The business relationship is considered paused, but not ended. The British company DeepMind, which belongs to the Google group, is still allowed to participate - the break does not affect relationships with other big tech companies.

Michael Ekstrand, co-chair of the conference sponsors, justifies the decision with the layoffs of Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, former leaders of the ethics and artificial intelligence (AI) team at Google. Layoffs reason for a break

Google had made headlines with the dismissal of the two employees in the past few months. The trigger was the planned publication of a paper. Together with colleagues, Gebru criticized the dangers posed by large AI language models. As a result, Google spoke out against publication of the paper as long as Gebru is mentioned as a co-author. Officially, the paper "did not meet the requirements for a publication", but there was suspicion that the company was just trying to get rid of an unpleasant critic. This approach caused unrest among Google employees, and accusations of racism were also loud.

Margaret Mitchel, founder and co-head of the ethical AI team, was fired a short time later for attempting to use automated scripts to find evidence of the discriminatory treatment of her colleague in emails. Google's mail system did not escape this and locked the AI researcher out of the system. Recently, the company announced some internal changes in how it handles its AI teams and their employees, as well as the research results. Suresh Venkatasubramanian, member of the FAccT program committee, announced on Twitter last Friday that he would like to re-examine the framework conditions for sponsorship in the coming year.

nkurz• 5 years ago

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=de&tl=en&u=htt...

andyxor2• 5 years ago

Gebru was fired for throwing tantrums and ultimatums to doxx her colleagues or she would resign, then blasting group email literally calling for sabotage.

her colleagues were 'walking on eggshells' around her for the fear of retaliation for any minor criticism https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t...

Mitchell was fired for exfiltrating thousands of files and sending to external accounts. https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/20/google-targets-ai-ethics-...

turbinerneiter3• 5 years ago

Google should have never started hiring ethical AI researchers. They should have hired AI researchers and made their stuff available to independent ethics researchers.

These independent researchers should be employed by i.e. a university and funded by government funds, maybe even additionally with an AI regulation fee (i.e. like car makers have to pay to certify their cars).

It makes no sense for them to hire their critics and then think they can stay independent. You are basically paying people to shit on your own products. Makes no sense.

madeofpalk• 5 years ago

You are basically paying people to shit on your own products. Makes no sense.

It's good to be critical of your own products to make them better. But you have to actually be willing to do that for it all to work.

evilpotatoes• 5 years ago

The criticism would need to be constructive to be useful, or at least specific enough to act on. Also, you can't go embarrassing the parent company, especially one as image-conscious as google.

marcinzm• 5 years ago

Few (none?) companies would be happy to pay someone to be publicly and loudly critical of their products. Especially if it wasn't constructive criticism that they could act on.

jimbokun3• 5 years ago

It’s a great resource to pay people to do that internally.

It’s a complete disaster to hire people who see their job description as shitting on the company publicly, with no constructive proposals for improvement.

vr46• 5 years ago

The last sentence here makes no sense - this is Google RESEARCH we’re talking about, and the issue is around the suppression of research, the sneaky modification of the papers by lawyers and then doubling down on the ensuing shitshow of recriminations, dirty-laundry-airing and anger of 2700 employees by firing people. Including the founder of the AI ethics unit.

What’s their top priority?

Optics? Or better AI? People doing research are not automatically critics, but it is their literal job in this area to ask the hard, hard questions, this is not Harry and Megan go Oprah, this is technology with far-reaching consequences.

turbinerneiter3• 5 years ago

Well, Google says they didn't surpress research, but that the researchers didn't follow process. Now we are all having an argument - we wouldn't have that if the researchers were truly independent.

marshmallow_123• 5 years ago

- You are basically paying people to shit on your own products. Makes no sense.

They aren't really researching ethics. This is what i think is going on there. recycling an old comment.

{ AI Ethical research can never be an accurate representation of the majority of humanity - or even the majority of its users! If it can it is not sustainable for any long period of time.

What about far more stable principles, such as murder and racism, you ask?

They are prone to being overplayed or downplayed, are state executions murder, or justice? What if the victim/ hangman happens to be black? Why should it matter? Just ignore some issues? That's misleading by omission.

It would be better to just admit "yes, we at Giant Tech know our ethics are bs, but we had to put something down or our machines won't work. Maybe we are not ready for advanced ai. Maybe there's a limit on what programmers can do. Yea. We know. turns out computers DO have limits. We'll have to find other ways to make money."

"But why should we say that!" cry all the executives when this speech is proposed to them.

"because it's true, and if we don't act now the company is screwed. And our clients will also get screwed" is the answer of the timid executive who first suggested this.

"how will the truth help us?" respond all the execs in unison.

"if we can keep up the lie for long enough, we shall all long be millionaires and retired before it implodes! We shall long be out of danger! who cares if some people lose money?"

"Yes, but don't you feel bad for all the shareholders? And how can we possibly fool people for decades to come that our ai isn't bs?" Responds the poor executive weakly.

"By creating a fake team and telling everyone they are ethics researchers" they say. "Really they are just pawns to help us earn more money. Fish get eaten by bigger fish you know?"

"can you just help me change a few lines on my press statement?" Asks the first executive.}

jseliger• 5 years ago

It may also be that Google didn't realize the extent to which they were inviting some of the more organizationally destructive and divisive elements of modern politically correct culture into their organization: https://jakeseliger.com/2020/12/03/dissent-insiders-and-outs.... It may be that we're going to see a trend towards "Leave politics and religion at the door."

nullifidian2• 5 years ago

and racism

Excuse me, but the definition of racism in the west is anything but stable. The definition has changed dramatically in the last decade, and it could change again.

aabhay2• 5 years ago

Yup, exactly. This is also the stance taken in the book Lingua Franca:

Ethics in AI should not be so convoluted as to require a separate profession; ethics should be distributed across an organization, flowing through and between individuals so that conversations of design naturally arrive at ethical questions. More crucially, everyone should have the tools to speak up and suggest improvements, so that no one person or set of people hold the keys to building ethical technology.

https://linguafranca.polytopal.ai/handbook/agency

StargazyPi• 5 years ago

That's a great resource (that links to even more great resources) - thanks for posting it.

I disagree that professional ethicists aren't needed in an organisation like Google though. Just as security should be lived and breathed by every developer, you still need some experts to consult when things get gnarly, light the way when you need many years of study to understand the concepts, and spot things that laypeople would miss.

The large language models Timnit was studying are a great example of this; people like her were (and are) needed to help the engineers understand the breadth and scope of the issues. Everyone in the org having their hearts in the right place doesn't replace expertise.

madhadron• 5 years ago

If we look at biology and medicine, there's both. The NIH requires everyone funded on their training grants to be given instruction in basic bioethics, and at the same time there is a profession of bioethics that is involved in grant review and oversight committees because a lot of cases aren't simple and covered by the basics. Bioethics enters the picture from regulation rather the way independent financial auditing does.

8note6• 5 years ago

I don't think these two agree? The go suggests keeping a separation between who's doing the researching and who's checking its ethics. Like, the ethics researchers should not be accountable to people who are incentivized to ignore them.

Instead, the quote suggests that the separation is unnecessary, and that elevating some people to specifically look at ethics is bad since it's everyone's job

jedimastert• 5 years ago

You are basically paying people to shit on your own products.

I mean, the only way to fix bad stuff is to find it?

turbinerneiter3• 5 years ago

Sure, but who is going to have a fair look? Someone who is employed by the company or someone who is independent?

VW faked their emissions - EPA uncovered it. Google is harming people with bad AI models - Google is uncovering it?

This works if the company is actually interested in finding the mistakes (i.e. MS finding security bugs in Windows), but not if the findings threaten your business.

MS has an interest in fixing security bugs, because it makes their product better.

No big corp has an interest in fixing their ethics, it's usually bad for their profit margins.

jariel3• 5 years ago

And what qualifies anyone to be an 'AI ethicist' anyhow?

This is a heavy question - it's problematically like elevating an individuals personal moral position, with all their little trivial baggage to something more than it is.

The challenge with these roles is very real: self awareness, objectivity, and processes for arriving at that are probably key. I suggest it would require a lot of engagement, feedback, possibly legal knowledge, reference etc..

AI credibility aside, the individuals chosen by Google previously were not remotely up for the job on a professional level, this was apparent from their public posture and even writing skills, and that's not slander, it's hard job.

As the OP indicates, some degree of objectivity as well, which may be difficult from within the company.

Finally, I would say it's entirely doubtful if AI requires it's own special branch of ethics. Everything Google does touches on ethical issues, and 'plain old search' much more so than perhaps anything else - certainly more than any of their core AI. It's a business and technology issue, not an AI issue. It just may require some insight from those familiar with the company.

All of that said, Google may lose the 'PR cover' of having a woman or PoC in the driver's seat.

SpicyLemonZest5• 5 years ago

While I don’t personally think her race or gender should matter, the new head of their AI ethics org is Marion Croak, so they’ll retain the PR cover you’re describing.

jonstewart• 5 years ago

No, Google should never have messed with their researchers’ publications; it’s always the coverup that becomes the story. Contrast Google Research with Microsoft Research, which enjoys a stellar reputation and independence.

crumbshot• 5 years ago

Exactly this. Indeed, looking at Timnit Gebru as an example of someone who worked at both, I'd be very surprised if her paper that was censored at Google would have had any issues in being published if she were still working for Microsoft. Despite the research being, by implication, critical of a growing market segment in Azure, regarding its environmental impact and so on.

jonathanstrange• 5 years ago

Absolutely, that's the only sane stance towards it. The original poster seems to imply that it's impossible to do sustainable ethical business because of conflicts of interests, but there are many ways to deal with such conflicts of interests without firing researchers or suppressing papers.

This case was really just mismanagement by Google. They could have just as well taken those researchers seriously, allow them to investigate whether there is systemic discrimination and then try to correct it, as was the whole point of hiring them in the first place. AI ethics researchers all over the world are publishing articles about the dangers of serious discrimination by large language models. Not addressing this and firing researchers who were working on it on their behalf is not going to help Google in the long run at all.

jariel3• 5 years ago

This is upside down.

There is no reason for Google to pay researchers and to not have some ownership over the process or outcome in some manner, in fact, it's unreasonable to contemplate otherwise.

Google was exceedingly gracious by sponsoring the work and having it make public in the first place.

The demands made of the researchers in question were quite minor, and completely appropriate, and frankly immaterial to the thrust of concerns anyhow.

To boot, accusations of 'racism' are vicious and repulsive.

If researchers want to be completely independent in the terms they might expect in academia - that's entirely understandable - perfectly fine - but they'll have to find jobs elsewhere.

Google has a Search Engine and bunch of other products, and to suggest that their major investment in research should entitle them to some kind of fair parameterize of the process is very reasonable.

To remedy the situation, and an obvious failure on Google's part, they should spend some time thinking about where that line is drawn, and what kind of expectations should be in place. In retrospect, it seems like a management failure for there to have been any misunderstanding on that front. But the point is -> there is a line. Researchers that don't want to with those parameters can make the choice not to. That's why we have both private and publicly funded research.

Aunche• 5 years ago

How do you know that the publication wasn't pulled because they genuinely thought it didn't meet their quality standards? When this happens at Microsoft research, the author makes a few revisions and moves on rather than accuse Microsoft of racism.

pfortuny• 5 years ago

You are basically paying people to shit on your own products.

In reality, if you want them to fulfill their true role, they are preventing you from producing wrong products (which should be good for the Company).

But Google understood that as you say (which is not what I think but this is beside the point), and that was their mistake.

jimbokun3• 5 years ago

That makes sense to pay someone to perform that function privately and internally.

It’s been a disaster for Google to have that happen in public.

titzer2• 5 years ago

You are basically paying people to shit on your own products. Makes no sense.

They hired them to control them. And it's a diversion to keep people thinking about the wrong things.

Theizestooke• 5 years ago

Yeah, it was a PR move.

KvanteKat• 5 years ago

Another useful (to Google) aspect of hiring an ethical AI team is also that is allows Google to shut down ethical concerns raised in other parts of its own organization by going "we agree that ethics is an important, but please focus on your own job", i.e. an internal AI team can act as a sort of "controlled opposition". The fact that the ethical AI team is now being undermined within the company after trying to do their job and making clear that they are not content to be relegated to such a role is pretty consistent with this motive.

sangnoir• 5 years ago

You are basically paying people to shit on your own products. Makes no sense.

Self regulation is preferable (to a private company) to industry-wide regulation, which in turn is preferable to government regulation.

If you want to avoid government oversight, either have internal oversight with the appearance of independence. Alternatively, have an "independent" overseeing body for your industry (whose behavior you may still indirectly control via nominations, seats on boards, funding, etc). Having an actual independent body providing oversight, appointed and controlled by an arm of government body is the worst outcome, yet it is inevitable when lapses arise, and voters demand "something be done" and you failed to provide a veneer of oversight, like Google is doing here.

SavantIdiot3• 5 years ago

Completely agree with independent auditing. If automotive safety had been deregulated, the body count would be orders of magnitude higher. This chart says it all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

The regulation of automotive safety in the 60's/70's had a huge impact.

It makes no sense for them to hire their critics and then think they can stay independent. You are basically paying people to shit on your own products. Makes no sense.

Shit on your own products?

So if I'm a good engineer and fix mistakes, I'm "shitting on my company's product?"

There's this belief in this post that un-examined AI is some shiny golden award, and ethics researchers are tarnishing it. It's the other way around.

Cederfjard2• 5 years ago

Does that not depend on your perspective? There might not be an alignment between what Google’s executives and shareholders want out of the company, and what an ethics researcher might consider ethical behavior.

thu2111• 5 years ago

I don't understand how your conclusion follows from the graph. That data would appear to indicate the opposite: that regulation had no effect.

The graph shows that vehicle safety improved steadily throughout the entire 20th century, without any sharp discontinuities. The key line is deaths per billion VMT. That is the figure which is invariant to how much driving people do, and which thus accurately measures how safe driving as an activity is. You appear to be looking at "deaths per million people" but that figure is confounded by big changes driven by the economy, which is why the 1970s energy crisis is highlighted on the graph. All you're seeing there is economic change, not change driven by regulation.

If regulation would have actually made a difference then it'd show up in the red line, but it doesn't. Conclusion: the regulation is useless. Private companies were doing fine at improving safety and always have been. And as regulations have costs, that in turn suggests they should be scrapped (zero impact + non-zero costs = repeal).

908B64B1975• 5 years ago

funded by government funds, maybe even additionally with an AI regulation fee

Ahh, rent-seeking at it's finest. Do we really want to use the tax payer's money to fund this type of behaviors[0]?

[0] https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...

astrange3• 5 years ago

It's good for Yann LeCun to quit Twitter if he's going to say silly things like "AI bias can always be fixed by collecting data" which is not true and not how his own employees fix issues - it's certainly not how the other FAANGs solve problems involving bias. Problems are perfectly capable of happening even if your data is the best it can be!

caturopath• 5 years ago

Google should have never started hiring ethical AI researchers. They should have hired AI researchers and made their stuff available to independent ethics researchers.

If you're going to submit your work to an external, independent review board, it's even more important that you have internal people working to address related concerns.

prepend2• 5 years ago

I wish ACM would act ethically in regards to SciHub.

finnthehuman• 5 years ago

For the avoidance of doubt, an example of a site ACM authors may post all versions of their work to, with the exception of the final published "Version of Record", is ArXiv.
Examples of sites ACM authors may not post their work to are ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Mendeley, or Sci-Hub, as these sites are all either commercial or in some instances utilize predatory practices that violate copyright

https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess

Not exactly an onerous policy, nor one that makes content hard to obtain.

Clewza313• 5 years ago

Ah, the sweet irony of accusing a free distributor of academic papers of "predatory practices", as opposed to the bloodsucking leeches at Elsevier & co.

prepend2• 5 years ago

They take sponsorship from for profit journals and that’s way worse for their field than anything Google does.

I find them hypocritical for cancelling this one sponsorship for “ethical” reasons but not addressing the actual problem that is the relationship of their professional society and for profit publishing.

geswit2x• 5 years ago

It's ironic how one of the biggest ban-hammers on earth got banned

ReptileMan• 5 years ago

Since google doesn't need ethicists but vice versa I think they will be fine after this crushing blow.

gambler• 5 years ago

Google's push to participate in AI ethics discussions has always been about controlling the narrative. The fact that it took them firing two people for ACM to notice is rather hilarious. Just read the papers they promote. The meta-narrative is rather clear. They want to present AI/ML as something that is dangerous in the hands of individuals or smaller companies and that requires constant and direct control from experts with tons of data and resources. So they're perfectly happy to talk about stuff like model bias, but the moment you start asking uncomfortable questions about ML in general you better watch out.

These topics should be handled by people without corporate ties. Period. The conflict of interests is so in-your-face, it's mind-boggling more people don't speak about it.

tiahura• 5 years ago

This will further marginalize AI ethics and can only be seen as a good thing.

NPR did yet another piece on the topic last weekend and interviewed an AI ethics expert. When, once again, I’m being told that the reason a system has a hard time identifying the features of black faces is systemic racism, and doesn’t even mention the optic and sensor issues, I think the field needs a reboot.

nerdponx6• 5 years ago

It is precisely systemic racism.

People who do not have dark skin make a system. It turns out that the system performs poorly on people with dark skin, and possibly causes discriminatory outcomes.

Perhaps the training data didn't have enough dark-skinned people. Or perhaps the optics and sensors didn't work well.

The point is that the outcome is biased against a certain group of people, and it's (edit: partly) because that affected group of people lacks representation in the group of people developing the system (edit: , because if they were represented they would have flagged the issue and it would have all been presented and handled differently).

No, it does not imply that the individual researchers are racist as such.

sprayk3• 5 years ago

Is there a way to prove that it is not caused by systemic racism? Having some unfalsifiable quality is pretty useless, and if it is the sort of thing that's never meant to end then that feels more like religion.

SpicyLemonZest5• 5 years ago

I understand what you're saying, but it sounds like you're aware of how prone this term is to misinterpretation. Virtually everyone outside of a particular small subculture understands "systemic racism" to be an accusation of racism. It would be like calling a correctness bug "systemic fraud" - how are the authors of the system supposed to avoid taking that as a personal attack?

HideousKojima4• 5 years ago

Alternative take:

Computers can most easily pick out facial features when there is significant color contrast, shadows cast on white skin create greater contrast than it can with darker skin, and the systems end up inherently working better on people with lighter skin due to basic math and physics.

Why hasn't some company out there designed a powerful system that works well with darker skinned people? It would be trumpeted by the tech press all over if they did, instead we just see articles about companies like Google manually tweaking the outcomes to appease the people complaining about racism.

uniqueid• 5 years ago

  This will further marginalize AI ethics and 
  can only be seen as a good thing.

I don't think marginalizing AI ethics 'can only' be seen as a good thing. Surely a few people don't want to be turned into paperclips.

SpicyLemonZest5• 5 years ago

In recent years, "AI ethics" generally refers to the problem of building regression models whose mechanics and outputs follow a certain set of political sensibilities. People investigating the problem you're describing typically identify their work as "AI safety".

sudosysgen5• 5 years ago

The reason why we don't care and still use passive optics to do face recognition when people with black skin exist is literally systematic racism.

HideousKojima4• 5 years ago

Or maybe it's just one of the simpler and least computationally expensive ways to do it? No systemic racism needed (unless you're stretching the meaning of the word beyond all recognition)

ThePowerOfFuet• 5 years ago

So I have to accept all of Heise's cookies or I have to pay?

Wow. Heise had a better reputation than that in my mind.

croes• 5 years ago

It's even worse. The new cookie banner reads "USA Consent: By clicking on "Accept", you consent to your data being processed by providers in the USA in accordance with Art. 49 (1) DSGVO. The USA is considered to be a country with an insufficient level of data protection according to EU standards. There is a risk that your data may also be passed on to US authorities."

motohagiography2• 5 years ago

I've written here once before that AI ethics researchers are like hiring hackers working in security, where they hold your products to an exogenous standard or ideal, which can add value, but has risks.

I've worked for companies who hired and then had to fire hackers for publishing vulnerabilities in their own and in customer products. Security is fundamentally a technology governance function, and AI ethics piece is also a technology governance function, where both hackers and AI ethics researchers are in-effect activists to create awareness for change, but aren't typically who you would put in the actual governance role.

An AI ethics conference has analogies to Defcon or Blackhat, in that shunning vendors because the attendees perceived that some prominent hackers were treated unfairly may have some precedents. Microsoft's relationship with Defcon in the 90's vs. post 2000 is an example of how this both happened and changed.

Extending that analogy, the disconnect in the relationship between researchers and vendors was a symptom of what a disadvantage the vendors were at to the asymmetric risk that activists/hackers posed because the media story of the conflict between giant corporations being vulnerable to scrappy hackers writes itself. In terms of how to handle it, google can probably use precedents from MSFT vs. defcon, and AI ethics researchers can look at how hackers both succeeded and failed to change security and tech governance.

jcims• 5 years ago

I've written here once before that AI ethics researchers are like hiring hackers working in security

Exactly, PoC or GTFO!

(i'll be here all week...)

(edit: maybe)

JumpCrisscross• 5 years ago

AI ethics researchers are like hiring hackers working in security

One of these can be objectively evaluated for skill. There may be unwanted side effects. But the skill is there or it isn’t. That does not apply to the other, which makes their hiring and firing fundamentally different.

ncann• 5 years ago

But the skill is there or it isn’t

If I understand what you saying correctly, you're saying AI ethics researchers have no skill?

Ar-Curunir• 5 years ago

So there is an objective measure for deciding how good a programmer is? Why don’t we just adopt that measure in interviews?

jjaammee• 5 years ago

Hacked or not hacked is easier to say than ethical or not. Your ethical standards maybe racism to others, everyone have their own interpretation of ethics.

currymj2• 5 years ago

AI Ethics isn't a non-technical field. See the accepted papers at the conference in question:

https://facctconference.org/2021/acceptedpapers.html

it's a mix of "soft" humanities, applied ML, methodology, algorithms/theory, and HCI.

it's not any harder to evaluate an AI ethics researcher than it is any other kind of researcher.

tester342• 5 years ago

I've written here once before that AI ethics researchers are like hiring hackers working in security

Except that afaik game studio actually hire people that worked on cheats - e.g Riot Games.

In order to be defender you also need to know how to attack.

Eridrus• 5 years ago

Yeah, the firing of Timnit Gebru strongly reminded me of the Michael Lynn saga: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/cisco_harasse...

I think the analogy breaks down a little since hackers were generally outsiders to the companies (even Michael Lynn), and hiring them and starting programs around them was the thing Microsoft did to fix their relationship to the community, whereas the folks here were already insiders at Google, but maybe that was the problem, that they were explicitly hired as academics with the expectation that they would keep doing the same work, rather than internally focussed researchers working on improving the products and systems being created.

astrange3• 5 years ago

She was fired because she threatened to quit, and Google is just as incapable of stopping themselves from firing people as they are of not deleting all the Terraria guy's accounts. It's all robots and business processes, it doesn't matter what "the problem" was or if there was one.

wwww4all• 5 years ago

Google hired these researchers to give them some basic facade of having concerns about AI ethics. They were supposed to write some nonsense papers and just act as shields when questions about AI ethics were raised.

When these people bit Google on the hand, Google got rid of them. Simple story.

Google is a monopoly and needs to be broken up under anti trust rules.

likelyunlikely• 5 years ago

As sad as I think this reasoning is, I think it's true. Google wanted someone to shield them from scrutiny with some hand wavy papers, making them feel good about what they are doing (disrupting the market!11!1!), just as pharma pays studies to prove what they want. Those researched probably just didn't get the implicit agreement or requirement, that Google already did everything right and well. And obviously Google isn't racist or biased, and if they are, they are doing everything they can to combat that /s.

specialist2• 5 years ago

We need something like ombudsmans. Roles with true independence. Built in checks and balances.

I have no idea how to make that work.

Maybe something like legal codification, so that publicly traded companies and the various parties are granted some temporary liability armor when vulnerabilities (or equiv) are identified.

PS- Just had a notion. Probably dumb: Maybe the liability (re)insurer gets a seat on the board of directors.

scsilver• 5 years ago

Set up a regulatory project on github and allow people to post annonymous "issues" to be addressed in a public forum?

908B64B1975• 5 years ago

The real problem with ethics is that it's not a science nor a rigorous discipline: it's a trend. It's whatever is trendy to say and think at the moment. You certainly don't have to understand the tech to practice "ethics" (if any technical knowledge was required the field would be pretty much empty).

The way it works is you basically shame people and tech. You don't need to make a strong or valid case against a behavior or a tech, like a law would, because it's not legally binding. It's not real engineering regulations like a building or fire code. At best it's a mob made of folks who convinced other ethics PhDs to grant them a PhD that will rally against you and shame you [0].

Great move from Google to stop feeding the ethics racket.

[0] https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...

teruakohatu2• 5 years ago

It's not real engineering regulations like a building or fire code

AI or Data Science ethicists tend to be qualified data scientists who have a better understanding of concepts like differential privacy than the vast majority of software developers. Don't dismiss them all because you disagree with some of them.

rav• 5 years ago

Great move from Google to stop feeding the ethics racket.

Read the article again - it's Google being uninvited as a sponsor. The title is poorly translated from German and should probably be changed to something like "Google no longer wanted as a sponsor of AI ethics conference".

motohagiography2• 5 years ago

While I could agree to a point, it's hard to separate the flavour of ethics from the need for reflection itself.

A thorny ethics example from my own role was a decade+ ago I was hired to do a privacy impact assessment (PIA) on an ML solution for detecting benefits fraud. It had all the ingredients for a complete debacle: "artificial intelligence"(?!), a vulnerable population, credit reporting companies, arms length government agencies, highly paid consulting firms, etc. What we delivered was modifications to the system to solve their core fraud risk problem without making peoples lives (more of) a dystopian hell.

Privacy is the currently the technology ethics department in large institutions, and I really see the AI ethics people as fancy privacy people with more math. Privacy has moved on from being a technical discipline that old hacker dudes like me did to being one largely done by women with law degrees. The tension between the security architect competency and the privacy policy analyst is still there in the field, but now we all see how they add a lot of value without needing the bottom-up view of a technologist.

The flavour of ethics in the privacy field has evolved, and I was absolutely suspicious of the change, as if you weren't a cypherpunk in privacy in 2005, you were a 5th column infiltrator looking to co-opt it for corporate ends - but of course, that's not true. Anyway a lot of text to say don't throw out babies with bathwater on AI ethics, but I'm saying they're not as new as anyone thinks, and if you think privacy is important, then you will probably recognize ethics in AI is important as well.

manux2• 5 years ago

The real problem with ethics is that it's not a science

This is simply untrue. The goal of AI ethics research is (also) to build algorithms where one of the _inputs_ is a set of ethics. It doesn't matter what those ethics are. It just so happens that the "set of ethics" currently fed in tends to have a particular flavor ("woke liberal" ethics), which you seem to disagree with. Finding the algorithms matters, and it's likely that the standard ethics put in are going to come from some dominant ideology, but we still need the algorithms if we are to understand how to make AI that aligns with humanity's interests (however they are defined).

I'd call that computer science.

currymj2• 5 years ago

this just isn't true; if you skim some abstracts of papers in the field, you will see that in fact there is a lot of technical content.

a lot of the big famous names in AI ethics (e.g. Moritz Hardt, Cynthia Dwork) also have very strong contributions outside this field.

yesenadam• 5 years ago

The real problem with ethics is that it's not a science nor a rigorous discipline: it's a trend. It's whatever is trendy to say and think at the moment.

Maybe it's trendy to say and think that? but that doesn't sound anything like ethics. Ethics is a part of philosophy, not a part of science or maths. That it is what it is, is not a "problem with ethics". (Sorry if I misunderstand you. Maybe you were just talking about "AI ethics". ...In which case, what do people who call AI ethics "ethics" call ethics, a.k.a. moral philosophy?)

hdhdhsjsbdh• 5 years ago

Hell, why not get rid of ethics entirely? Especially since people have been arguing about this for thousands of years already. And really it’s been pointless if you think about it, considering we can’t just answer it like a math problem. What good has it done us, other than forming the basis of modern societies, jurisprudence, religion – basically the substrate upon which humanity is built. We’ve clearly moved past the need for it though.

Bancakes3• 5 years ago

Ethics can last centuries and are the basis of customary law and the idea of a "reasonable and prudent person". AI engineers don't have their hide in the game, they just work. It's not interesting.

Introducing AI as automation for human jobs has consequences beyond one company's profits. So there needs to be non-profits or committees that take a stance and represent themselves. There doesn't need to be some scientific papr on "AI hut my job" because all the science is on the company's part, making the AI in the first place.

6gvONxR4sf7o• 5 years ago

In that case, let’s look at the differences. In the case of ML researchers, careers are built on publications. I imagine a hacker who discovers a big vulnerability in their employer probably would be burning bridges if they published the vulnerability before the employer could fix it. In AI ethics, or at least the most notorious recent case, it seemed like publishing was the primary function and change was secondary.

Then there’s the ease of changing things. In security, I’d imagine fixing a vulnerability might require lots of work, but rarely novel research. In ML that’s not the case. and after all that research, the finding might be a way to improve the worst cases by worsening the average cases, lowering revenue. And then there’s the clarity of what even is an issue. If someone shouldn’t be able to access a file, but they can, it’s clear. The goal then is convincing stakeholders that the problem should be prioritized. In AI ethics, you have to convince them that the problem even is a problem, convince them to allocate research, then convince them that the technique is worth lowering revenue for, and only then get to the question of allocating resources to implement the fix. Convincing stakeholders to prioritize fixes is a wholly different game.

I like your analogy, and there are surely lessons to be learned (e.g. maybe the ethics researchers’ primary job shouldn’t be publishing papers), but the differences are strong enough that the lessons might not extend too far.

JPKab5• 5 years ago

The problem with AI ethics as a field is that it attracts a whole lot of activists, most of whom have mediocre contributions to the field at best, zero contributions at worst. Watching highly entitled, and often narcissistic people with no tangible accomplishments attack Yan LeCun is pretty insane.

The head of AI at Nvidia, who is very aggressive in her AI Ethics activism, recently put a screenshot of a list of names, which included mine, on a public tweet. In the tweet, she described the list as containing "fan boys" of an academic critical of "wokeness" as he calls it. I didn't know anything about the academic. I was added to the list because I commented on her tweet attacking him and asked her if she had engaged in any verbal discussions with him. That's it. I asked a question, and was put on a list proclaiming everyone in it as alt-right bigots. I found out about this because a former colleague called me and told me I was on the list. I didn't follow the guy she was attacking or anything like that. Not that it would have been justified if I had.

It should be noted that I was a leading advocate at a large enterprise software company for getting CUDA integration and helping NVIDIA sell more hardware in the enterprise. NVIDIA didn't fire her, and they should have.

908B64B1975• 5 years ago

It should be noted that I was a leading advocate at a large enterprise software company for getting CUDA integration and helping NVIDIA sell more hardware in the enterprise.

Should have paused the project and reached out to the sales team responsible for your company's corporate account. Would have been interesting to see who pulls more weight (sales and paying customers or ethics "researchers").

joshuamorton8• 5 years ago

Claiming that Gebru has no tangible accomplishments is factually wrong. She's lead author on multiple highly impactful papers.

I asked a question, and was put on a list proclaiming everyone in it as alt-right bigots.

Were you, or are you editorializing her actions? Because what you actually described is that she put you on a list

of "fan boys" of an academic critical of "wokeness" as he calls it

That's not calling you alt-right. I believe the stated purpose of the list was to have a set of people that allies could engage with constructively if they wanted to. In other words, it was a list of people whom might be good to engage in verbal discussions with. Because of that, you're calling for her to be fired. Why?

jeremysalwen• 5 years ago

NVIDIA didn't fire her, and they should have.

Talk about cancel culture.

ausbah3• 5 years ago

most researchers have mediocre, marginal, or straight up "un-sexy" contributions to a field, that's just how most research happens. it doesn't make anyone "less of a researcher" though

I also would also everyone look at Gebru's work [1] - certainly seems like they're an established research who comes from a top university, has published in top conferences, and has a good understanding of the technical parts of the field

one's past experiences with something they are criticizing or defending is probably a good prior to have, but also shouldn't be the sole criterion. "leading" scientists are more often than not wrong on plenty of things

http://ai.stanford.edu/~tgebru/

diebeforei485• 5 years ago

I agree with this - "ethicists" without much experience in the field tend to be the worst people.

a1369209993• 5 years ago

it attracts a whole lot of activists, most of whom have mediocre contributions to the field at best, []zero contributions at worst.[]

That is absurdly, unjustifiably optimistic. The worst activists have larger negative contributions than the best contributors have positive contributions. And as you yourself have observed, even typical activists often have worse-than-zero contributions.

Bancakes3• 5 years ago

Why would you be an "AI expert" to make judgements on AI?

In fact, it's more politically consistent to have equal representation. We already know what AI experts believe - make money in the end.

karmasimida• 5 years ago

hiring hackers working in security

Hackers offer solution to your loophole, AI ethnics researchers only call you out and hijacking the narrative for their own benefits.

bo1024• 5 years ago

This is not generally true.

ThinkBeat• 5 years ago

Security consultants / pros come in with the bias that your software is insecure. Then they strive to prove it. If they do prove it, it is verifiable. By any other researcher pretty quickly. It is verifiable.

When a professional opinionator is brought in with a bias that this data / company is racist/ transphobic / not inclusive then drafts a report proving it.

It is much harder to validate it.

It cannot even be evaluated as a legal argument with references (or missing reference) to laws.

Ethics is inherently philosophical field. From it stems understanding and ideas that may be codified in an interpretation of them into laws. Then those laws are tested and case law and valid interpretations are formulated.

sershe• 5 years ago

The difference is that the security is objectively verifiable - either they were able to compromise data/access/..., or not. Despite the different incentives for the company and the hackers, if you can't break in, you cannot just fabricate a vulnerability because your paycheck depends on it.

Whereas "ethics" is a subjective field, so you can invent arbitrary "ethics violations", and you would - precisely because your paycheck depends on it. This is not new, see also bioethics - at best it's completely useless, at worst it's basically self-sabotage and your competitors would be happy to see you engage in it.

hn_throwaway_992• 5 years ago

This title is confusing in English. It makes it sound like Google is the entity that made the decision not to sponsor, instead of the conference organizers. A better title would be "AI ethics conference organizers no longer want Google as sponsors".

tantalor• 5 years ago

It's confusing because passive voice is used.

Tomte• 5 years ago

No, it's confusing, because the sentence (which isn't actually in the passive voice) is word-by-word identical to another sentence, but with with a totally different meaning. So that many people will parse it as the other sentence.

(The German sentence doesn't have that ambiguity)

imagine992• 5 years ago

I did submit it under a completely different title but unfortunately someone changed it to this abomination. I don't know what if anything I can do about it because I also thought it can now be construed as the exact opposite.

I think

   Google declared "persona non grata" as sponsor of AI ethics conference by ACM

was my original title.

"Persona non grata" to me was the best translation of "unerwünscht" in the original German headline. There might have been other options but "wanted" certainly is extremely awkward and ambiguous in comparison. But stuff like that keeps happening on HN, it has certainly been a "known bug" for many years, which sometimes leads me to just not visiting or commenting/submitting for a couple of weeks until I've stopped fuming over the unappealable, authoritative actions by someone who doesn't know their limits... ;-)

monkeyingaround• 5 years ago

I think this pretty much tells me everything I suspected about HN.

tester342• 5 years ago

I think adding "is" - "Google is no longer wanted..." would be enough

Sverigevader• 5 years ago

I'm not a native english speaker but I understood it as; "The conference is no longer accepting the sponsorship by Google" or "The AI ethics research conference (an entity) no longer wants Google (another entity) as their sponsor and suspends them from sponsoring."

How would it be interpreted as being the other way around?

Edit: This is the headline when I read it: "AI ethics research conference suspends Google sponsorship"

I realized that it might have been changed now.

nullifidian2• 5 years ago

Considering that "AI ethics" basically means we shouldn't have AI until we can guarantee that AI doesn't commit thought crimes(according to the current groupthink morality prevalent among the educated class), it's not surprising.

ausbah3• 5 years ago

that's disingenuous at best. AI systems are already deployed in the judicial system, surveillance systems, healthcare, and who knows how many other domains that effect people's lives - with many instances to suggest that a large % of systems treat people differently along undesirable features like race or gender due to encoding negative biases or whatever the cause may be

dt123• 5 years ago

one for /r/nottheonion

purerandomness• 5 years ago

The title is misleading. It's confusing because the German original title make clear that ACM does not want Google to be a sponsor anymore, whereas the English title adds the possibility that it might be Google who wanted to sponsor the conference, but then decided not to.

perryizgr8• 5 years ago

What's the value of an AI ethics conference if the largest AI powerhouse is not allowed to take part?

naebother• 5 years ago

Good. Imagining a world where Lockheed no longer wants to sponsor the cluster-munitions ethics conference and that's viewed as a negative.

rexreed• 5 years ago

Now that sounds like a fun conference to attend. I'd be curious about the positive impacts of cluster munitions, altho I'd be hard pressed to find any. I would imagine an ethics conference on this topic would have one session: "do not use".

ausbah3• 5 years ago

"build bigger cluster munitions to deter our enemies"?

Nimitz14• 5 years ago

This is an ambiguous, and therefore bad, title.

kelvin0• 5 years ago

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Bluestein3• 5 years ago

Big G sponsoring an AI ethics conference would be like Bonnie Parker sponsoring an ethical banking committee ...

Bluestein3• 5 years ago

(Apparently somebody -did- remember who Parker was :)

Bluestein3• 5 years ago

I suffer silently the wrath of the big G!

Shall I compare them to the Bonnie and Clyde

due their ethical struggling for AI?

Big G can do no evil, plain as that

their critics only will avail squat.-

(... or down votes, apparently :)

While Parkers in the end got their due trap

Our every browse does big G still now track

Who am I meager I to claim that G

cannot do evil, but lone evil be?

As father time allowed for a short while

that Bonnie and Clyde their banking tryst did hide

now does the G control our searches all

But not with evil! No! how dare we call!

An ethical conundrum fore us lies

Is big G fit to master our AIs?

There's only one big G, I need not tell.

The rest of them can burn wholesale in ...

dang• 5 years ago

I've changed the URL from https://www.heise.de/news/Google-als-Sponsor-fuer-KI-Ethik-K... to which seems to be the main 3rd party article on this in English.

Submissions to HN need to be in English. We have deep respect for German and other languages, but HN is an English-language site. It's important that the community be able to read an article. When people can't read an article they react purely to the title, which leads to shallower discussion.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I've also changed the title from "Google no longer wanted to sponsor the AI ethics conference", which unless my rudimentary German is betraying me, actually is not what the heise.de headline says. If I understand the story correctly, it's the conference that didn't want Google.

g42gregory• 5 years ago

In other news, Google suspends indexing of the said AI ethics research conference, so that no one knows about it.

AI ethics research conference suspends Google sponsorship

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