But that aside, Google should want this kind of paper published. They absolutely should want to know and discuss every possible weakness in the ethics of their approach to AI - Google has a scale of influence so large that how they act in areas like AI, trickles down to many other organisations. To me, that gives them a responsibility to make it as ethical as is reasonably possible, and that will only happen if experts are allowed to speak freely.

One can make short-term arguments about how that hurts them, but the long-term damage of getting massive AI systems wrong, will be far, far worse.

that reminds how in USSR each non-miniscule factory, organization, etc. had "the department #1" - it was an ideological check and control department which at sufficiently large/important organizations even included KGB officers.

1. There exist laws to prevent discrimination against people based on protected attributes 2. ML models make predictions based on attributes without interpretability (it's not possible to prove that protected attributes are not factoring into model predictions) 3. Empirical observation that a model proxies a protected property exposes corporation to liability for regulatory non compliance 4. Therefore any study that could expose bias of a model used in production is to be road blocked or prevented ...

To combat flows like above -- seems like regulators are going to need to update rules with third party audits and an incentive structure that encourages self-regulation and derisks self-detection and self-reporting of non-intentional violations... ideally google should not be put into a position where it is incentivized to police its own ai ethics research to ensure that such research doesn't expose their own illegal/non-compliant activity ...