I missed
this interview with Timnit Gebru, who Google fired for helping to write a paper about how large language models can be biased.
It’s very dangerous if you have these kinds of researchers doing what my co-lead was calling “fig leaf”—cover-up—work. Like, we’re not changing anything, we’re just putting a fig leaf on the art. If you’re in an environment where the people who have power are not invested in changing anything for real, because they have no incentive whatsoever, obviously having these kinds of researchers embedded there is not going to help at all.
Every company of this size has some kind of “ethics team” and some internal forum to discuss them in. And this is how a company can have it both ways. You have the ethics experts and the internal discussion to show you care about not harming people. But the key is: You (the executives) politely ignore those people. You say, hey, great job talking about the ethics! Then, you keep on doing whatever helps you capture the market.