Google fired another top artificial intelligence researcher Margaret Mitchell in the latest escalation of internal tensions over the company after December the controversial outbreak of Timnit Gebru, a black AI ethicist. It’s as if the public relations fire with Google’s artificial intelligence ethics team hasn’t already had enough fuel.
Mitchell, who previously led the team with Gebru, was caught using automated scripts to comb through work emails to find evidence of discrimination and harassment to support Gebru’s claims. Axios reports. In January, she lost access to her corporate email after Google launched an investigation into her business. In a statement to Reuters, Google claims that Mitchell’s dismissal followed the disciplinary recommendations of the investigators and an examination committee. Google said it violated the company’s code of conduct and security policies and transferred electronic files outside the company.
Mitchell announced his termination Friday night in a tweet. When you are contacted for comment CNN Regarding Google’s claims, she told the media: “I don’t really know those accusations. I mean, most of them are new to me. ”
He joined the company in 2016 as a principal investigator in research and founded Google’s AI ethics team with Gebru. For the past few months, Mitchell has openly criticized Google’s sudden dismissal by Gebru, one of the company’s few black employees (only 3.7% of Google’s U.S. staff is black according to Annual Diversity Report 2020). Gebru claims that she was fired after expressing concern about the company’s quality diversity protocols and its testing censorship research critical of its products.
Gebru’s shooting “created a domino effect of trauma for me and the rest of the team, and I think we’re being punished more and more for that trauma,” Mitchell wrote. on Twitter Friday. Another leading AI researcher at the company, Alex Hanna, posted a screenshot on Twitter that evening, he is supposed to have received an e-mail which he received from the highest ones, threatening him to follow on the cutting block.
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Thousands of Google employees and experts in the AI community protested Google’s decision to fire Gebru, which led to increased scrutiny of the company’s ethical research. Now it seems that internal tensions have started to boil over, as Google tries to stop dissidents and quickly turn the page on the controversy, burying it in a stream of policy changes. Earlier this week, Google announced plans to restructures its teams responsible for AI to strengthen leadership under Marian Croak, Google’s vice president of engineering. Hours before Mitchell’s launch, Google reportedly sent an internal email detailing several other new research and diversity policy changes that the company has implemented following an internal investigation into Gebru’s termination.