It was only in December that Google LLC found itself the topic of controversy once again when it fired Dr. Mimnit Gebru, one of its leading artificial intelligence ethicists, and today a very similar story hit the news.

The company said Gebru had given her superiors an ultimatum, which was to publish her paper or she’d resign. Those superiors accepted her resignation. Shortly after, Gebru took to social media saying as a black woman working for a “white patriarchy,” she had been discriminated against.

She also said her paper had been turned down because of censorship and her uncovering of inconvenient truths that might affect Google’s bottom line, although Google countered by saying the paper just wasn’t good enough and Gebru had been warned about that before. Outside Google, critics who have read the paper have said the departure of Gebru might lead to a “chilling effect.”

She’s not fired **yet**. But apparently they’ve told her she will be locked out for at least a few days. https://t.co/H1ibkgNQHM

— Timnit Gebru (@timnitGebru) January 20, 2021

Today another top AI ethicist has had her account locked, though she wasn’t fired. Nonetheless, that worker, Margaret Mitchell, is currently being investigated by Google. According to Axios, this has a lot to do with Gebru and her departure. Axios wrote that Mitchell had been “using automated scripts to look through her messages to find examples showing discriminatory treatment of Gebru before her account was locked.”

After what happened to Gebru, Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai had tried to calm things down by saying he’d look into why she felt so sure she had been forced out of the company. But again Google has come out looking heavy-handed.

“Our security systems automatically lock an employee’s corporate account when they detect that the account is at risk of compromise due to credential problems or when an automated rule involving the handling of sensitive data has been triggered,” Google said in a statement to Axios. “In this instance, yesterday our systems detected that an account had exfiltrated thousands of files and shared them with multiple external accounts. We explained this to the employee earlier today.”

Mitchell hasn’t yet responded to that statement, although she took to Twitter yesterday accusing Pichai of “alienating black women.”

Photo: Jennifer Moo/Flickr