By Chathushka Perera
New York, USA (CWBN)_ Google’s senior management has requested reports on research carried out by its employees on sensitive topics such as gender, race, and politics to “take great care to strike a positive tone”, in consultation with legal, policy and public relations teams, Reuters reported.
An internal policy document stated that “Advances in technology and the growing complexity of our external environment are increasingly leading to situations where seemingly inoffensive projects raise ethical, reputational, regulatory or legal issues.”
Several Google employees have confirmed the policy statement, however, Google has not made any response with regard to the leak.
It was also claimed that the process was an extension of Google’s existing standards of review of papers for “sensitive topics”, including leaking trade secret and other pitfalls.
Moreover, Google has gone beyond demanding to firing researches, as with the case of prominent AI ethicist, Timnit Gebru, earlier this month, after she voiced her frustrations over Google’s decision to retract a research paper. Gebru was working as the co-leader of the company’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team at the time.
An internal circular written by Google’s Head of AI, Jeff Dean, explaining his decision to fire Gebru, obtained by Platformer said that “Timnit co-authored a paper with four fellow Googlers as well as some external collaborators that needed to go through our review process (as is the case with all externally submitted papers).”
“Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted.” Dean wrote.
He added that, “A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why […] we acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper.”
