As layoffs continue in and around Twitter, the new head of Twitter, Elon Musk has recently cut the entire team of Ethical AI. The Ethical team confirmed their tweets.
The Director of the ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability team at Twitter, Rumman Chowdhury, shared a tweet announcing that she has been terminated by the firm. This was soon followed by parting messages from several other team members, demonstrating that they have been let go under the global firings hinted at by Musk on Thursday.
In a post confirming the information about the recent layoffs, Rumman Chowdhury talked about feeling the “relief that you’re the one on the receiving end of Thanos’ snap”.
She also shared an image of her logged-out account details, citing that her credentials have been reversed which ultimately meant she was no longer an employee.
According to a Wired report, Chowdhury was mentioned this week saying that her team’s work has been set on hold after Musk’s acquisition. “We were told, in no uncertain terms, not to rock the boat,” she said.
Another worker from the Ethical AI team, former Senior Engineer Manager at Twitter’s META, Joan Deitchman, posted a tweet thanking her group associates for being “full of integrity.”
Joan Deitchman, who was the unit’s senior manager, disclosed that the whole team had been laid off.
“Yep, the team is gone,” Deitchman wrote today. “The team that was researching and pushing for algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice.”
“The team that was inventing and building ethical AI tooling and methodologies,” she added. “All that is gone.”
The problem has been increasing with AI implementation, including biases around race, gender, and age. Not only big tech companies but also small tech companies have installed “ethical AI” teams dedicated to pointing out and solving such issues.
Twitter’s META unit was more progressive than most in terms of publishing details of problems with the company’s AI systems and allowing outside researchers to query its algorithm for new issues.
Under the recent management systems, this is not the only team that has been fired by the CEO of Twitter. The company already fired the majority of its employees, over 200 of them from India as a part of mass global layoffs.
Elon Musk acquired Twitter in the last week of October. After the acquisition, he has been laying off a bunch of employees across different departments and offices from around the world.