A year ago Google artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru tweeted, “I’ve been fired” and caused a controversy about employees’ freedom to question the impact of their company’s technology. Fifth, she founded a new research institute to question the responsible use of artificial intelligence, which Gebru says Google and other tech companies won’t do.
Gebru, founder and chief executive officer of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAIR) Research, said: “Instead of fighting from within, I wanted to present a model for an independent organization with a variety of incentive structures. The first part of her name alludes to her aim to be more comprehensive than most AI labs — which white, west and south skewers—And recruit people from parts of the world rarely represented in the tech industry.
Gebru was kicked out of Google after clashing with bosses over a Research literature recommends caution with new word processing technology enthusiastically adopted by Google and other tech companies. Google did say she resigned and wasn’t fired, but admitted that later fired Margaret Mitchell, another researcher with Gebru co-led a research group on ethical AI. The company order new check about topics its researchers might explore. Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds declined to comment but directed WIRED to a recent report on the company’s work on AI governance, says Google has published more than 500 papers on “responsible innovation” since 2018.
The failure at Google highlighted inherent conflict in technology companies sponsor or hire researchers to study the impact of the technology they seek to profit from. Earlier this year, organizers of a leading conference on technology and society canceled Google’s sponsorship of the event. Gebru said DAIR would be more comfortable questioning the potential downsides of AI and would not be stymied by academic politics and publishing pressures, which she said could complicate the school’s research further. University.
Gebru said DAIR will also work to demonstrate applications for AI that may not have been developed elsewhere, with the aim of inspiring others to use the technology in new directions. One such project is the creation of a public dataset of aerial images of South Africa to examine how the legacy of apartheid is still ingrained in land use. . Preliminary analysis of the images shows that in a once heavily populated area with a limited non-white population, where many poor people still live, most of the vacant land developed between 2011 and 2017 has converted into affluent residential areas.
ONE paper about that project will mark the official launch of DAIR in the field of academic AI research later this month at NeurIPS, the world’s most prominent AI conference. DAIR’s first investigator, Raesetje Sefala, who lives in South Africa, was the lead author of the paper, which included external researchers.
Safiya Noble, a professor at UCLA who studies how technology platforms shape society, serves on DAIR’s advisory board. She says that Gebru’s project is an example of the new and more inclusive type of institutions needed to make progress in understanding and responding to the impacts of technology on society.
“Black women are major contributors to helping us understand the harms of big tech and other types of technology to society, but we know the limits of American business and,” Noble said. the academy that black women face. “Timnit recognized the harm Google was doing and tried to intervene, but with little help — at a company in dire need of such understanding.”
Noble recently launched a nonprofit of its own, Equity Instruments, to support the ambitions of Black women. She was joined on DAIR’s advisory board by Ciira wa Maina, a lecturer at Dedan Kimathi University of Technology in Nyeri, Kenya.
DAIR is now a non-profit project Law of Science and Society but will then incorporate as a nonprofit in its own right, Gebru said. Her project has received funding 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 undertaking consulting work related to its research.
