Gebru herself tweeted, “This is what is called ethics washing” — referring to the tech industry’s tendency to trumpet ethical concerns while ignoring findings that hinder companies’ ability to make a profit.Speaking to The Verge, Emily Bender, a professor at the University of Washington who co-authored the paper with Gebru and Mitchell, said Google’s presentation didn’t in any way assuage her concerns about the company’s ability to make such technology safe.“From the blog post [discussing LaMDA] and given the history, I do not have confidence that Google is actually being careful about any of the risks we raised in the paper,” said Bender. “For one thing, they fired two of the authors of that paper, nominally over the paper. If the issues we raise were ones they were facing head on, then they deliberately deprived themselves of highly relevant expertise towards that task.”

Google needs to be clearer about how it’s tackling these dangers

In its blog post on LaMDA, Google highlights a number of these issues and stresses that its work needs more development. “Language might be one of humanity’s greatest tools, but like all tools it can be misused,” writes senior research director Zoubin Ghahramani and product management VP Eli Collins. “Models trained on language can propagate that misuse — for instance, by internalizing biases, mirroring hateful speech, or replicating misleading information.”

But Bender says the company is obfuscating the problems and needs to be clearer about how it’s tackling them. For example, she notes that Google refers to vetting the language used to train models like LaMDA but doesn’t give any detail about what this process looks like. “I’d very much like to know about the vetting process (or lack thereof),” says Bender.

It was only after the presentation that Google made any reference to its AI ethics unit at all, in a CNET interview with Google AI chief Jeff Dean. Dean noted that Google had suffered a real “reputational hit” from the firings — something The Verge has previously reported — but that the company had to “move past” these events. “We are not shy of criticism of our own products,” Dean told CNET. “As long as it’s done with a lens towards facts and appropriate treatment of the broad set of work we’re doing in this space, but also to address some of these issues.”

For critics of the company, though, the conversation needs to be much more open than this.