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A year ago Google artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru wrote on Twitter: “I was fired” and sparked controversy over the freedom of employees to question the impact of their company’s technology. On Thursday, she launched a new research institute to ask questions about the responsible use of artificial intelligence, which Gebru, Google and other technology companies say will not.
“Instead of fighting from within, I want to show a model of an independent institution with a different set of incentives,” said Gebru, who is the founder and CEO of Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research (DAIR). The first part of the name is a reference to its goal of being more inclusive than most artificial intelligence laboratories – which distort whites, westerners and men – and recruiting people from parts of the world rarely represented in the technology industry.
Gebru was fired by Google after clashing with bosses over a research paper calling for caution with new word processing technology enthusiastically embraced by Google and other technology companies. Google said it had resigned and had not been fired, but acknowledged that it had later fired Margaret Mitchell, another researcher who, along with Gebru, led a team researching ethical AI. The company has set up new inspections on topics that its researchers can explore. Google spokesman Jason Freidenfeld declined to comment, but directed WIRED to a recent report on the company’s AI management work, which said Google had published more than 500 articles on “responsible innovation” since 2018.
The implications at Google highlighted inherent conflicts in technology companies that sponsor or hire researchers to study the effects of the technology they seek to profit from. Earlier this year, the organizers of a leading conference on technology and society canceled Google’s sponsorship of the event. Gebru says DAIR will be freer to question the potential shortcomings of AI and will be unencumbered by academic policies and pressure to publish, which she says could complicate university research.
DAIR will also work to demonstrate uses of AI that are unlikely to be developed elsewhere, Gebru said, with the goal of inspiring others to take the technology in new directions. One such project is the creation of a public set of aerial imagery data from South Africa to study how the apartheid legacy is still engraved in land use. Preliminary analysis of the images found that in a densely populated region, once confined to non-white people, where many poor people still live, most of the vacant land developed between 2011 and 2017 has been turned into rich residential neighborhoods.
A paper on this project will mark DAIR’s official debut in AI academic research later this month at NeurIPS, the world’s most famous AI conference. DAIR’s first research associate, Raesetje Sefala, based in South Africa, is the lead author of an article involving external researchers.
Safia Noble, a UCLA professor who studies how technology platforms shape society, serves on the DAIR Advisory Board. She says the Gebru project is an example of the kind of new and more inclusive institutions needed to make progress in understanding and responding to the impact of technology on society.
“Black women have been instrumental in helping us understand the harms of high technology and the different types of technology that are harmful to society, but we know the boundaries of corporate America and the academic environment that black women face,” Noble said. . “Timnit recognized the damage in Google and tried to intervene, but was massively unsupported – in a company that desperately needs this kind of insight.”
Noble recently launched his own nonprofit, Equity Engine, to support the ambitions of black women. She is joined by the DAIR Advisory Board Ciira wa Maina, a lecturer at Dedan Kimathi University of Technology in Nyeri, Kenya.
DAIR is currently a non-profit project of the Code for Science and Society, but will later join as a non-profit organization in its own right, Gebru said. Her project has received grants totaling more than $ 3 million from the Ford, MacArthur, Rockefeller and Open Society Foundations, as well as the Kapor Center. Over time, she hopes to diversify DAIR’s financial support by taking on consulting work related to her research.
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