Google fired another top artificial intelligence researcher Margaret Mitchell in the latest escalation of internal tensions at the company after the controversial expulsion from Timnit Gebru, a black AI ethicist. As if the PR fire with Google’s AI ethics team didn’t have enough fuel yet.
Mitchell, who previously led the team alongside Gebru, was caught using automated scripts to comb through her work emails to find evidence of discrimination and harassment to back up Gebru’s claims. Axios reportsIn January, she lost access to her corporate email after Google launched an investigation into her activity. In a statement to Reuters, Google claims that Mitchell’s dismissal followed disciplinary recommendations from investigators and a review committee. Google said it violated the company’s code of conduct and security policies and transferred electronic files outside the company.
Mitchell announced her termination Friday night a tweetWhen reached for comment by CNN On Google’s claims, she told the outlet, “I don’t really know about those allegations. I mean, most of it is news to me.”
She joined the company in 2016 as a senior research scientist and co-founded Google’s AI ethics team with Gebru. In recent months, Mitchell has been openly critical of Google’s abrupt dismissal of Gebru, one of the company’s few black employees (only 3.7% of Google’s US workforce is black according to the Annual report diversity 2020Gebru claims she was fired after raising concerns about the company’s shoddy diversity protocols and the attempt to do so censor research critical of its products.
Gebru’s firing “created a domino effect of trauma for me and the rest of the team, and I believe we are increasingly being punished for that trauma,” Mitchell wrote. on Twitter Friday. Another leading AI researcher at the company, Alex Hanna, tweeted a screenshot allegedly that night from an email she received from educated people threatening to be next on the chopping block.
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Thousands of Google employees and experts in the AI community protested Google’s decision to fire Gebru, and it led to greater control over the company’s AI ethics research. Now it seems internal tensions have started to bubble as Google tries to silence dissenters and hastily turns the page on the controversy by burying it in a flood of policy changes. Earlier this week, Google announced plans restructure the responsible AI teams to consolidate leadership under Marian Croak, Google’s VP of engineering. Hours before Mitchell’s resignation, Google reportedly sent an internal email containing a number of other new research and diversity policy changes that the company implemented in the wake of an internal investigation into Gebru’s termination.