Google’s co-head of ethical AI says she was fired for email

Gebru had been an outspoken critic of the lack of diversity and unequal treatment of Black workers at tech companies, particularly at Alphabet Inc’s Google, and said she believed her dismissal was meant to send a message to the rest of Google’s employees not to speak up. — Reuters

Timnit Gebru, a co-leader of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence team at Google, said she was fired for sending an email that management deemed “inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager”.

The email and the firing were the culmination of about a week of wrangling over the company’s request that Gebru retract an AI ethics paper she had co-written with six others, including four Google employees, that was submitted for consideration for an industry conference next year, Gebru said in an interview Thursday. If she wouldn’t retract the paper, Google at least wanted the names of the Google employees removed.