Zach Vorhies

Google Leaks: "Seeds of Change"

Google Ethicist Margaret Mitchell details the role "Machine Learning Fairness" will play in shaping the future of humanity.


Update: Margaret Mitchell has been fired by Google: Techcrunch story

Part of the full Google Disclosure, which you can see here.
PDF link.

What this document shows

"Seeds of Change: Root causes of algorithmic unfairness, and a path forward" is an internal Google document in which Google ethicist Margaret Mitchell describes the role "Machine Learning Fairness" will play in shaping the future. Google later fired Margaret Mitchell, as TechCrunch reported in February 2021. The pages of the document are reproduced below; the original PDF is linked above.

Key quotes from the document

Quoted verbatim from the "Seeds of Change" slide deck (go/seeds-of-change):

  • Seeds of Change: Root causes of algorithmic unfairness, and a path forward
  • At a high level, where is unfairness creeping in?
  • Training data are collected and annotated. Model is trained and evaluated. Media are filtered, ranked, aggregated, or generated.
  • We tend to mention and share things that are outside of our expectation of day-to-day norms; ignoring the things that "go without saying".
  • Top results show historical unfairness, implicit associations, and implicit stereotypes reflected in Reporting Bias

Sources and further reading

About the Google Leaks disclosure

This page is part of the Google Leaks: 950+ pages of internal Google documents that Zach Vorhies, a Senior Software Engineer at Google and YouTube for 8.5 years, took with him when he resigned from Google in June 2019. He delivered them to the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice in August 2019 and released them to the public through Project Veritas. The documents describe, in Google's own words, how Google defined "fake news", built its "Machine Learning Fairness" system and kept blacklists across Google Search, YouTube and Google News. He tells the full story in his book Google Leaks: An Expose of Big Tech Censorship (Skyhorse Publishing).

Read the full archive on the Google Leaks page, the dated sequence of events in the timeline, and who Zach Vorhies is on the about page.

Document pages

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