Google fired another leading artificial intelligence researcher, Margaret Mitchell, in the company’s latest escalation of internal tensions after December controversial expulsion by Timnit Gebru, an ethics expert at Black AI. As if the public relations fire with Google’s AI ethics team didn’t have enough fuel.
Mitchell, who previously led the team alongside Gebru, was caught using automated scripts to sift through his work emails to find evidence of discrimination and harassment to support Gebru’s allegations, Axios Reports. In 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 his termination on Friday night in a tweet. When contacted to comment by CNN in relation to Google’s claims, she told the channel: “I don’t really know about those claims. I mean, most of that is new to me.
She joined the company in 2016 as a senior research scientist and founded Google’s AI ethics team with Gebru. In recent months, Mitchell has openly criticized the abrupt dismissal of Gebru by Google, one of the company’s few black employees (only 3.7% of Google employees in the U.S. are black, according to his 2020 Annual Diversity Report) Gebru says she was fired after raising concerns about the company’s poor quality diversity protocols and her attempt to censorship research criticism of their products.
Gebru’s resignation “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,” wrote Mitchell on twitter Friday. Another leading AI researcher at the company, Alex Hanna, tweeted a screenshot that night, supposedly from an email she received from superiors threatening that she was next on the chopping block.
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Thousands of Google employees and experts from the AI community protested Google’s decision to fire Gebru, which led to further scrutiny about the company’s AI ethics research. Now it seems that internal tensions have started to bubble as Google tries to muzzle dissidents and turn the page on the controversy by burying it in a barrage of policy changes. Earlier this week, Google announced plans to restructure your responsible AI teams to consolidate the leadership of Marian Croak, vice president of engineering at Google. Hours before Mitchell’s resignation, Google reportedly sent an internal email detailing several other new surveys and changes in the diversity policy that the company implemented following an internal investigation into Gebru’s termination.