(Protocol) In her resignation letter Wednesday, Google ethical AI researcher Alex Hanna accused the company of having deep “rot” in its internal culture, “maintain[ing] white supremacy behind the veneer of race-neutrality” and being a workplace where those with “little interest in mitigating the worst harms” of its products are promoted at “lightning speed.”
“I am quitting because I’m tired,” Hanna wrote, announcing that she is joining the research institution recently founded by Timnit Gebru, the prominent AI ethicist who previously co-led Google’s ethical AI team. Gebru was fired from the company in 2020 after raising concerns about natural-language processing. Hanna will be accompanied by Dylan Baker, a software engineer who also resigned Wednesday, in joining Gebru’s Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute.
“When I joined Google, I was cautiously optimistic about the promise of making the world better with technology. I’m a lot less techno-solutionist now,” Baker wrote in a separate letter, in which they wrote about the “cognitive dissonance” of working for a place where full-time employees and contract workers received such different benefits. “I understand in vivid detail how far Google leadership will go to feel like they’re protecting their precious bottom line,” Baker wrote.
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