A group of Google employees has published an open letter on Medium calling out an alleged double standard in the company related to freedom of expression surrounding the Israel-Palestine war. The essay condemns “hate, abuse and retaliation” within the company against Muslim, Arab and Palestinian workers. The employees who penned the letter, which doesn’t include specific names out of fear of retaliation, demand that CEO Sundar Pichai, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and other senior leaders publicly condemn “the ongoing genocide in the strongest possible terms.” In addition, they urge the company to cancel Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion deal to supply AI and other advanced tech to the Israeli military.
“We are Muslim, Palestinian, and Arab Google employees joined by anti-Zionist Jewish colleagues,” the letter opens. “We cannot remain silent in the face of the hate, abuse, and retaliation that we are being subjected to in the workplace in this moment.”
The letter cites specific examples of emotionally charged and inappropriate workplace behavior. These include unnamed Googlers accusing Palestinians of supporting terrorism, committing “slander against the Prophet Muhammad,” and publicly calling Palestinians “animals” on official Google work platforms. The group describes leadership as “standing idly by” in the latter two cases, and it says Google managers have called employees “sick” and “a lost cause” for expressing empathy toward Gaza residents.
The employees say Google managers have publicly asked Arab and Muslim people in the company if they support Hamas as a response to their concern for Palestinian families. “There are even coordinated efforts to stalk the public lives of workers sympathetic to Palestine and to report them both to Google and law enforcement for ‘supporting terrorism,’” the letter reads.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai
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Other examples cited include “heartfelt appeals” to donate to a charity for Gaza citizens being “met with multiple comments dehumanizing Gazans as being ‘animals,’ disregarding their plight and calling upon Googlers to boycott relief work for civilians due to the fact that Palestinian schools and hospitals were being used for ‘terrorism.’” The letter also accuses Google managers of using their rank to “question, report, and attempt to get fired Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian Googlers who express sympathy with the plight of the besieged Palestinian people.” It describes one manager endorsing “surveillance of Google employees on social media,” and then openly harassing them on Google work platforms.
“You have to be very, very, very careful, because any sort of criticism toward the Israeli state can be easily taken as antisemitism,” Sarmad Gilani, a Google software engineer who tells Engadget he did not take part in the letter, said in an interview with The New York Times. “It feels like I have to condemn Hamas 10 times before saying one tiny, tiny thing criticizing Israel.”
In an emailed statement to Engadget, Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini wrote, “As we’ve shared, this is a highly sensitive time and topic in every company and workplace, and we have many employees who are personally affected. The overwhelming majority of those employees are not engaged in internal discussions or debate, and many have said they’ve appreciated our fast response and our focus on the safety of our employees.” The company said the situation involves a small number of Googlers whose views don’t represent the entire workforce. It encourages employees to voice concerns to HR, and it adds that it has taken action within the last month when conduct violates company policy.
The tensions inflamed in the last month by the Israel-Palestine war have resurfaced resentments about Google’s involvement in Project Nimbus. In 2021, Google and Amazon workers penned a similar open letter calling on their companies to pull out of the deal, which they said would enable surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians. Today’s letter echoes that sentiment. “We demand that Google stop providing material support to this genocide by canceling its Project Nimbus contract and immediately cease doing business with the Israeli apartheid government and military,” it reads.
In response to the Project Nimbus concerns, Google spokesperson Mencini wrote to Engadget, “This is part of a longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google. We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial platform by Israeli government ministries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education. Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
Update, November 8, 2023, 11:04 PM ET: This story has been updated to correct an error that interpreted the NYT interview with Sarmad Gilani as indicating he participated in the letter. However, he clarified to Engadget that he was not involved with the letter to Google management. We regret the error and apologize to Mr. Gilani.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-workers-publish-letter-criticizing-companys-israel-palestine-double-standard-181516404.html?src=rss
Just days after President Joe Biden unveiled a sweeping executive order retasking the federal government with regards to AI development, Vice President Kamala Harris announced at the UK AI Safety Summit on Tuesday a half dozen more machine learning initiatives that the administration is undertaking. Among the highlights: the establishment of the United States AI Safety Institute, the first release of draft policy guidance on the federal government's use of AI and a declaration on the responsible military applications for the emerging technology.
"President Biden and I believe that all leaders, from government, civil society, and the private sector have a moral, ethical, and societal duty to make sure AI is adopted and advanced in a way that protects the public from potential harm and ensures that everyone is able to enjoy its benefits,” Harris said in her prepared remarks.
"Just as AI has the potential to do profound good, it also has the potential to cause profound harm, from AI-enabled cyber-attacks at a scale beyond anything we have seen before to AI-formulated bioweapons that could endanger the lives of millions," she said. The existential threats that generative AI systems present was a central theme of the summit.
"To define AI safety we must consider and address the full spectrum of AI risk — threats to humanity as a whole, threats to individuals, to our communities and to our institutions, and threats to our most vulnerable populations," she continued. "To make sure AI is safe, we must manage all these dangers."
To that end, Harris announced Wednesday that the White House, in cooperation with the Department of Commerce, is establishing the United States AI Safety Institute (US AISI) within the NIST. It will be responsible for actually creating and publishing the all of the guidelines, benchmark tests, best practices and such for testing and evaluating potentially dangerous AI systems.
These tests could include the red-team exercises that President Biden had mentioned in his EO. The AISI would also be tasked in providing technical guidance to lawmakers and law enforcement on a wide range of AI-related topics, including identifying generated content, authenticating live-recorded content, mitigating AI-driven discrimination, and ensuring transparency in its use.
Additionally, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is set to release for public comment the administration's first draft policy guidance on government AI use later this week. Like the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights that it builds upon, the draft policy guidance outlines steps that the national government can take to "advance responsible AI innovation" while maintaining transparency and protecting federal workers from increased surveillance and job displacement. This draft guidance will eventually be used to establish safeguards for the use of AI in a broad swath of public sector applications including transportation, immigration, health and education so it is being made available for public comment at ai.gov/input.
Harris also announced during her remarks that the Political Declaration on the Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy the US issued in February has collected 30 signatories to date, all of whom have agreed to a set of norms for responsible development and deployment of military AI systems. Just 165 nations to go! The administration is also launching a a virtual hackathon in efforts to blunt the harm AI-empowered phone and internet scammers can inflict. Hackathon participants will work to build AI models that can counter robocalls and robotexts, especially those targeting elderly folks with generated voice scams.
Content authentication is a growing focus of the Biden-Harris administration. President Biden's EO explained that the Commerce Department will be spearheading efforts to validate content produced by the White House through a collaboration with the C2PA and other industry advocacy groups. They'll work to establish industry norms, such as the voluntary commitments previously extracted from 15 of the largest AI firms in Silicon Valley. In her remarks, Harris extended that call internationally, asking for support from all nations in developing global standards in authenticating government-produced content.
“These voluntary [company] commitments are an initial step toward a safer AI future, with more to come," she said. "As history has shown in the absence of regulation and strong government oversight, some technology companies choose to prioritize profit over: The wellbeing of their customers; the security of our communities; and the stability of our democracies."
"One important way to address these challenges — in addition to the work we have already done — is through legislation — legislation that strengthens AI safety without stifling innovation," Harris continued.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/kamala-harris-announces-ai-safety-institute-to-protect-american-consumers-060011065.html?src=rss
The Biden Administration unveiled its ambitious next steps in addressing and regulating artificial intelligence development on Monday. Its expansive new executive order (EO) seeks to establish further protections for the public as well as improve best practices for federal agencies and their contractors.
"The President several months ago directed his team to pull every lever," a senior administration official told reporters on a recent press call. "That's what this order does, bringing the power of the federal government to bear in a wide range of areas to manage AI's risk and harness its benefits ... It stands up for consumers and workers, promotes innovation and competition, advances American leadership around the world and like all executive orders, this one has the force of law."
These actions will be introduced over the next year with smaller safety and security changes happening in around 90 days and with more involved reporting and data transparency schemes requiring nine to 12 months to fully deploy. The administration is also creating an “AI council,” chaired by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed, who will meet with federal agency heads to ensure that the actions are being executed on schedule.
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Public safety
"In response to the President's leadership on the subject, 15 major American technology companies have begun their voluntary commitments to ensure that AI technology is safe, secure and trustworthy before releasing it to the public," the senior administration official said. "That is not enough."
The EO directs the establishment of new standards for AI safety and security, including reporting requirements for developers whose foundation models might impact national or economic security. Those requirements will also apply in developing AI tools to autonomously implement security fixes on critical software infrastructure.
By leveraging the Defense Production Act, this EO will "require that companies developing any foundation model that poses a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety must notify the federal government when training the model, and must share the results of all red-team safety tests," per a White House press release. That information must be shared prior to the model being made available to to the public, which could help reduce the rate at which companies unleash half-baked and potentially deadly machine learning products.
In addition to the sharing of red team test results, the EO also requires disclosure of the system’s training runs (essentially, its iterative development history). “What that does is that creates a space prior to the release… to verify that the system is safe and secure,” officials said.
Administration officials were quick to point out that this reporting requirement will not impact any AI models currently available on the market, nor will it impact independent or small- to medium-size AI companies moving forward, as the threshold for enforcement is quite high. It's geared specifically for the next generation of AI systems that the likes of Google, Meta and OpenAI are already working on with enforcement on models starting at 10^26 petaflops, a capacity currently beyond the limits of existing AI models. "This is not going to catch AI systems trained by graduate students, or even professors,” the administration official said.
What's more, the EO will encourage the Departments of Energy and Homeland Security to address AI threats "to critical infrastructure, as well as chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and cybersecurity risks," per the release. "Agencies that fund life-science projects will establish these standards as a condition of federal funding, creating powerful incentives to ensure appropriate screening and manage risks potentially made worse by AI." In short, any developers found in violation of the EO can likely expect a prompt and unpleasant visit from the DoE, FDA, EPA or other applicable regulatory agency, regardless of their AI model’s age or processing speed.
In an effort to proactively address the decrepit state of America's digital infrastructure, the order also seeks to establish a cybersecurity program, based loosely on the administration's existing AI Cyber Challenge, to develop AI tools that can autonomously root out and shore up security vulnerabilities in critical software infrastructure. It remains to be seen whether those systems will be able to address the concerns of misbehaving models that SEC head Gary Gensler recently raised.
AI watermarking and cryptographic validation
We're already seeing the normalization of deepfake trickery and AI-empowered disinformation on the campaign trail. So, the White House is taking steps to ensure that the public can trust the text, audio and video content that it publishes on its official channels. The public must be able to easily validate whether the content they see is AI-generated or not, argued White House officials on the press call.
Adobe
The Department of Commerce is in charge of the latter effort and is expected to work closely with existing industry advocacy groups like the C2PA and its sister organization, the CAI, to develop and implement a watermarking system for federal agencies. “We aim to support and facilitate and help standardize that work [by the C2PA],” administration officials said. “We see ourselves as plugging into that ecosystem.”
Officials further explained that the government is supporting the underlying technical standards and practices that will lead to digital watermarking’ wider adoption — similar to the work it did around developing the HTTPS ecosystem and in getting both developers and the public on-board with it. This will help federal officials achieve their other goal of ensuring that the government's official messaging can be relied upon.
Civil rights and consumer protections
The first Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights that the White House released last October directed agencies to “combat algorithmic discrimination while enforcing existing authorities to protect people's rights and safety,” the administration official said. “But there's more to do.”
The new EO will require guidance be extended to “landlords, federal benefits programs and federal contractors” to prevent AI systems from exacerbating discrimination within their spheres of influence. It will also direct the Department of Justice to develop best practices for investigating and prosecuting civil rights violations related to AI, as well as, according to the announcement, “the use of AI in sentencing, parole and probation, pretrial release and detention, risk assessments, surveillance, crime forecasting and predictive policing, and forensic analysis."
Additionally, the EO calls for prioritizing federal support to accelerate development of privacy-preserving techniques that would enable future large language models to be trained on large datasets without the current risk of leaking personal details that those datasets might contain. These solutions could include “cryptographic tools that preserve individuals’ privacy,” developed with assistance from the Research Coordination Network and National Science Foundation. The executive order also reiterates its calls for bipartisan legislation from Congress addressing the broader privacy issues that AI systems present for consumers.
In terms of healthcare, the EO states that the Department of Health and Human Services will establish a safety program that tracks and remedies unsafe, AI-based medical practices. Educators will also see support from the federal government in using AI-based educational tools like personalized chatbot tutoring.
Worker protections
The Biden administration concedes that while the AI revolution is a decided boon for business, its capabilities make it a threat to worker security through job displacement and intrusive workplace surveillance. The EO seeks to address these issues with “the development of principles and employer best practices that mitigate the harms and maximize the benefit of AI for workers,” an administration official said. “We encourage federal agencies to adopt these guidelines in the administration of their programs.”
Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP
The EO will also direct the Department of Labor and the Council of Economic Advisors to both study how AI might impact the labor market and how the federal government might better support workers “facing labor disruption” moving forward. Administration officials also pointed to the potential benefits that AI might bring to the federal bureaucracy including cutting costs, and increasing cybersecurity efficacy. “There's a lot of opportunity here, but we have to to ensure the responsible government development and deployment of AI,” an administration official said.
To that end, the administration is launching on Monday a new federal jobs portal, AI.gov, which will offer information and guidance on available fellowship programs for folks looking for work with the federal government. “We're trying to get more AI talent across the board,” an administration official said. “Programs like the US Digital Service, the Presidential Innovation Fellowship and USA jobs — doing as much as we can to get talent in the door.” The White House is also looking to expand existing immigration rules to streamline visa criteria, interviews and reviews for folks trying to move to and work in the US in these advanced industries.
The White House reportedly did not brief the industry on this particular swath of radical policy changes, though administration officials did note that they had already been collaborating extensively with AI companies on many of these issues. The Senate held its second AI Insight Forum event last week on Capitol Hill, while Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to speak at the UK Summit on AI Safety, hosted by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Tuesday.
Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images
At an event hosted by The Washington Post on Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was already arguing that the executive order did not go far enough and could not be considered an effective replacement for congressional action, which to date, has been slow in coming.
“There’s probably a limit to what you can do by executive order,” Schumer told WaPo, “They [the Biden Administration] are concerned, and they’re doing a lot regulatorily, but everyone admits the only real answer is legislative.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/sweeping-white-house-ai-executive-order-takes-aim-at-the-technologys-toughest-challenges-090008655.html?src=rss