He participated in the award, he said, “because of my sense at the time that Google was building an ethical AI team with industrial leadership potential.”
At the time, Gebru said that the management of Google AI told him to withdraw the paper from the examination for presentation at a conference or to remove his name from it. Google said it accepted Gebru’s resignation in connection with a list of requests it had sent to him via email, which had to be met for her to continue working for the company.
All of this was heavily focused on Stark on Wednesday, March 10, when Google sent him a congratulatory note, offering him $ 60,000 for his research project proposal to look at how companies launch AI that is used to detect emotions. Stark said he immediately felt the need to turn down the award to show support for Gebru and Mitchell, as well as those still on Google’s AI ethics team.
“My first thought was, ‘I have to give up,'” Stark told CNN Business.
“With good conscience, I can no longer accept funding from a company that treats its employees in this way,” Vijay Chidambaram, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who studies storage systems, told CNN Business. Chidambaram previously received $ 30,000 from Google in 2018 for a research project.
The money involved is of little importance to Google. But the growing failures of Google’s tensions with its ethical AI team now pose a risk to the company reputation and stature in the AI community. This is crucial because Google is fighting for talent – both as employees of the company and names connected to it in the academic community.
“I think this is more prevalent than even the company realizes,” Stark said.
Declining in solidarity
Despite his initial inclination, Stark did not immediately turn down the Google award. He spoke to colleagues about what he intended to do – “People supported any decision I made,” he said – before sending his response to Google next Friday. He thanked the company for the “vote of confidence” in its research, but wrote that it “refuses this award in solidarity with Dr. Gebru and Dr. Mitchell, their teammates and all those who have been in similar situations,” according to e-mails viewed by CNN Business.
“I look forward to working with Google Research again, as the organization and its leaders reflected on their decision in this case, addressed the damage they caused, and committed themselves, through words and deeds. , to promote critical research and products that support fairness and justice, “Stark wrote.
Gebru said he appreciates Stark’s action.
“It’s a big deal for someone to refuse to sponsor Google,” she told CNN Business. “Especially someone who starts early in their career.”
A Google spokesman said that in the last 15 years, the company has awarded more than 6,500 academic and research grants to those outside of Google. Stark is the first person to refuse one, according to the spokesman.
“It was a real fiasco the way they were treated”
However, Stark’s decision is only the latest demonstration of solidarity with Gebru and Mitchell.
“It was a real fiasco [Gebru and Mitchell] were treated. No one has even apologized yet, “she told CNN Business in a recent interview.” I don’t want to interact with companies that behave like that towards top researchers. ”
Google’s efforts to push the boundaries in AI
Google is aware that its reputation as a research institution has been affected in recent months and the company has stated that it intends to remedy it. At a recent Google City Hall meeting, which Reuters reported for the first time and CNN Business also got the sound, the company highlighted the changes it is making to its internal research and publishing practices.
“I think the way to regain trust is to continue to publish state-of-the-art papers in many, many areas, including overstepping the boundaries of responsible AI, publishing things that are deeply interesting to the research community. I think it’s one of the better ways to continue to be a leader in research, “said Jeff Dean, head of AI at Google. He was answering a question from employees about outside researchers, saying they would read Google newspapers” with more skepticism now ”.
Gebru hopes that, like the FAccT, several conferences will reevaluate their relationships with technology companies’ research labs. Historically, much of the work in the development and study of AI has been done in academia. But as companies have found more and more commercial uses for the technology, the lines between academia and the corporate world have blurred. Google is just one of many technology companies that have a major influence on academic conferences that publish many of the work of its researchers; its employees sit on conference forums and sponsor numerous conferences each year, sometimes worth tens of thousands of dollars.
For example, Google and some subsidiaries of its parent company, Alphabet, were listed as sponsors for $ 20,000 “platinum” and $ 10,000 “gold” at the International Machine Learning Conference or ICML and the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems or NeurIPS. , in 2020 – both key AI conferences. And some of the company’s employees sit on their organizing committees.
ICML President John Langford said the conference is “currently open for sponsorship” by Google for its 2021 conference, which is set for July.
“There are quite a lot of ongoing discussions about how ICML, as a conference, should encourage good culture and machine learning practices, with a future sponsorship policy, which is part of that discussion,” he added. he.
NeurIPS CEO Mary Ellen Perry said the conference has not yet made its annual call for sponsorships, but that applications “will be assessed against a set of selection guidelines implemented by sponsorship presidents in This year”; NeurIPS is scheduled for December.
However, for Stark and others in the academic research community, their criteria for accepting funding from Google have already changed.
“The extra money for research would be great,” Stark said. “But it was something I felt I couldn’t take.”