The tech giant said in a blog post on Thursday that Marian Croak, a black woman who was vice president of the company for six years, working on a number of projects, including getting public Wi-Fi on railways in India, will manage a new center focused on responsible AI within Google Research. The announcement, which included a video interview with Croak, praised his decades of experience in technology and patents for technologies such as voice over IP.
Croak will report to Jeff Dean, head of AI at Google. Ten teams focused on AI ethics, fairness and accessibility – including the ethical AI team, which Gebru had previously helped to lead – will report to her.
The move was first reported by Bloomberg on Wednesday night.
In the blog post, Croak pointed out how new the field of ethical AI is – it has been on the radar screens of many AI researchers for just a few years. She noted that there are “many conflicts” currently in the field, such as the standardization of definitions of “justice” or “security”, which can be polarizing.
“And what I would like to do is for people to have the conversation in a more diplomatic way, perhaps, than we are having now, so that we can really move forward in this field,” she said. It also plans to conduct a “critical assessment of all AI systems that are currently deployed or in design and try to understand where the gaps are” and work within Google to mitigate “potential damage”.
Until early December, when she abruptly left the company, Gebru was the co-leader of the Google AI team. A pioneer in AI prejudice and inequality research, she was also one of the few black employees in the company at large (3.7% of Google employees are black, according to the company’s 2020 annual diversity report). The researcher is also a co-founder of the Black in AI group, which aims to increase the representation of blacks in the area.
Gebru initially tweeted that she had been “fired immediately” by an email she had recently sent to Google’s internal Brain Women and Allies mailing list. In the email, she expressed dismay at the continued lack of diversity in the company and frustration with an internal process related to the review of an unpublished research article by her co-author. Dean said in an email to Google Research employees (who he also posted publicly) that the article in question was not submitted for internal review well in advance of its deadline and that “it did not meet our standards for publication”.
In subsequent tweets, Gebru clarified that no one at Google explicitly said she was fired. Instead, she said that Google would not meet a number of her conditions for returning and accepted her resignation immediately because she felt her email reflected “behavior incompatible with the expectations of a Google manager”.
Gebru’s sudden departure sparked anger among many Google employees and others in the tech industry that continues to boil months later, often displayed through exciting Twitter posts. CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a memo to Google (GOOG)employees right after she left that the company would investigate what happened.
Earlier this month, two Google employees resigned due to Gebru’s departure, and Margaret Mitchell, a Google researcher who until Gebru’s abrupt departure co-led the group with her, was placed on administrative leave in January, as she said. confirmed to CNN Business at the time.
A Google spokeswoman did not comment on Croak’s new position, and pointed to CNN Business for the company’s blog post.
Gebru was not immediately available for comment, but in a
tweet thread on Wednesday night she wrote that Croak’s ad, another black woman, makes it look “as if we were all interchangeable” and called the company’s moves since its departure “beyond gas lighting”.
“I don’t have enough words to express how terrible it is now,” she wrote.
A Google employee familiar with the situation who asked to remain anonymous because of privacy concerns said that they and other employees learned of Croak’s appointment from the Bloomberg news on Wednesday night, and not from Google itself, although a meeting on Thursday fair has confirmed the change. The official said that morale in the AI ethical group was “very low”.
“I am very, very upset,” said the official.
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