Google channels Big Tobacco with research censorship

In the wake of the firing of Timnit Gebru and other notable AI researchers at Google, Alphabets circled the wagons and lawyered up. Reports flow out of Mountain View depicting teams of lawyers censoring scientific research and acting as unnamed collaborators and peer-reviewers.

Most recently, Business Insider managed to interview several researchers who painted a startling and bleak picture of what its like to try and conduct research under such an anti-scientific regime.

Per the article, one researcher said:

Youve got dozens of lawyers no doubt, highly trained lawyers who nonetheless actually know very little about this technology and theyre working their way through your research like English undergrads reading a poem.

The problem here is that Google isnt censoring research to avoid, say, its secrets getting out. Its lawyers are targeting scientific research that makes the company look bad.

The person quoted above added that they were specifically talking about crossing out references to fairness and bias and scientists being told to change the results of their work. Its not only unethical, its incredibly dangerous.

The tea: Googles AI is broken. It might be a trillion-dollar company and the most cutting-edge AI outfit on Earth, but its algorithms are biased. And thats dangerous.

No matter how you slice it, Googles AI doesnt work as well for people who dont look like the vast majority of Googles employees (white dudes) as it does for people who do. From Searchs conflation of Black people and animals to the algorithms running the camera on the Pixel 6s inability to properly process non-white skin tones, Googles machine-learning woes are well-documented.

This is a big problem and it isnt easy to fix. Imagine building a car that didnt work as well for Black people and women as it did for white guys, selling 200 million, and then people slowly learning their automobiles were racist.

Thered be a lot of feelings and emotions about what that would mean.

Googles current situation is a lot like that. Its products are everywhere. It cant just recall Search or put Google Ads on hold for a few days while it rethinks the entire world of deep learning to exclude bias. Why not fix world hunger and make puppies immortal while theyre at it?

So what do you do when youre one of the richest companies in the world and you come up against a truth so awful that its existence makes yourmodel seem evil?

You do what big tobacco did. You find people willing to say whats in your companys best interests and you use them to stop the people telling the truth from sharing their research.

The National Institutes of Health released research in 2007 describing the role of lawyers during the big tobacco legal battles of the previous decades.

In the paper, which is titled Tobacco industry lawyers as a disease vector, the researchers attribute the spread of diseases associated with long-term tobacco use to the tactics employed by industry lawyers.

Some key takeaways from the paper include:

And were seeing the same potential with Googles approach. The companys treating the scientific method as an optional component of research.

As researcher Jack Clark, formerly of OpenAI, pointed out on Twitter:

I like to collaborate with people in research and I do a huge amount of work on AI measurement/assessment/synthesis/analysis. Why would I try and collaborate with people at Google if I know that theres some invisible group of people who will get inside our research paper?

Clarks talking about legibility here, the idea that the researchers have their names on the papers but the censors and lawyers dont.

See, down the road a few years, if Googles inability to address bias or create algorithms that are fair turns out deadly at scale over time,no lawyers will be harmed in the proceeding lawsuits.

And thats not fair. Billions of people put their trust in Google products every day. The AI we rely on is a part of our lives that influences our decisions. Whatever Googles lawyers are hiding could hurt us all.

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Google channels Big Tobacco with research censorship