Croak, a vice president of engineering, will be the Lead for
the Responsible AI Research and Engineering Center of Expertise, she said in a
YouTube video announcing her appointment Thursday. The Alphabet unit has sought
to defuse employee rancor stemming from the acrimonious departure of a
prominent Black researcher, Timnit Gebru. Croak, a Black Google executive who
is currently focused on site-reliability matters, will report to Jeff Dean, the
senior vice president of Google AI.
Croak acknowledged in the video that there's a lot of
“dissension” in the ethical AI realm right now, with researchers disagreeing on
principles.
“Whose definition of fairness, or safety, are we going to
use?” she said. “There's quite a lot of conflict right now within the field,
and it can be polarising at times. And what I'd like to do is have people have
the conversation in a more diplomatic way, perhaps, than we're having it now,
so we can truly advance this field.”
Croak will oversee the Ethical AI team that's become the
focus of intense scrutiny as well as employees on other fairness teams. These
include people working on machine learning, computer-vision systems, natural
language processing and those who engineer fairness products, a person familiar
with the situation told Bloomberg News, which was first to report the changes.
Megan Kacholia, who attracted employee criticism after dismissing Gebru, will
no longer oversee these researchers, the person said.
Gebru responded to the news by writing on Twitter that
Google was trying to “neutralise one Black woman with another.”
I don’t have enough words to express how awful this is right now. And maybe will find the words in the morning.
— Timnit Gebru (@timnitGebru) February 18, 2021
Absolutely horrible
Is anyone going to be fooled by the timing? Someone had said they were thinking about this but I never thought a news story would be out TONIGHT
The crisis began in early December when Gebru, who's best
known for showing how facial recognition algorithms are better at identifying
White people than Black people, said she was fired by email.
Google said it had accepted her resignation after a conflict
over an AI research paper critical of its technology that Google executives
demanded Gebru retract or remove Google authors from. Her dismissal upset the
Ethical AI research team she co-led, with members of her group taking to
Twitter to publicly support her and criticise Google.
Two weeks later, a group of Google artificial intelligence
researchers sent a sweeping list of demands to management calling for new
policies and leadership changes. Five weeks ago, Google also sidelined the other
leader of its AI ethics research team, Margaret Mitchell, locking her out of
its corporate network.
This isn't the first time Google has turned to Croak to
handle the issue. A few days after Gebru's dismissal, Croak moderated a meeting
of Dean and Kacholia on one side, and researchers and the Black Googlers
Network on the other.
“My biggest disappointment is with Marian Croak legitimising
this,” Gebru wrote on Twitter. “Starting with hosting Megan & Jeff's
gaslighting session.”
© Bloomberg LP
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