Timnit Gebru: Google’s ‘dehumanizing’ memo paints me as an angry Black woman
Khari Johnson
In a companywide memo to employees Wednesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he’s sorry about the way the company fired prominent AI ethics co-lead Timnit Gebru. He said he accepts “the responsibility of working to restore your trust” and that the company is now considering the implementation of “de-escalation strategies.” He concluded his comments about why Google fired one of the best-known Black female AI researchers in the world by stating that the company treats diversity as a priority.
In response to the memo, Gebru said Pichai’s comments play to the trope that she’s an angry Black woman and called the content “dehumanizing.”In an interview with VentureBeat on Wednesday, Gebru talked about toxic workplace culture in Big Tech, ethics washing, keeping AI research free from corporate influence, and the two things she wants young women and people of color interested in entering the field of machine learning to know.
Since Google fired Gebru, many of her colleagues from the Google AI ethics team, the rest of the company, and the wider tech community have demanded accountability and change. In the past week, more than 2,000 Googlers and over 3,700 supporters in academia and industry have signed a petition supporting Gebru and calling what happened to her “a retaliatory firing,” and a case of “unprecedented research censorship.”
https://venturebeat.com/author/kjohnson/
