Google AI Researcher’s Departure Ignites New Conflict Over Ethics

December 17, 2020

(Bloomberg) – Google has gotten itself into another management crisis. On Dec. 2, Timnit Gebru, an artificial intelligence researcher best known for showing how facial recognition algorithms are better at identifying White people than Black people, said she’d been fired. Gebru’s boss described her departure as a resignation, but both sides acknowledged the conflict centered on Google’s discomfort with a research paper Gebru planned to publish about ethical issues related to technology that underpins some of the company’s key products.