Workers at one of the most advanced AI labs on the planet say they have important information to share — but their employer is preventing them from speaking out.
New reporting by the Washington Post revealed a growing divide between workers and management at Google’s DeepMind lab in London, where employees are gagged from letting the public know about their concerns due to a sweeping non-disparagement agreement.
Non-disparagement agreements are a kind of legal corporate censorship, by which companies can ensure workers aren’t able to disclose info the company deems to be negative or critical. At the DeepMind labs, it appears to be having its intended effect, scaring workers who say they’d like to be able to keep the public involved as the technology progresses.
“This technology is just really consequential and it’s also changing really fast,” one anonymous DeepMind staffer told WaPo. “The public wants to know and deserves to know and often this is the only way that people find out about the harms and potential harms that are happening.”
Two of the lab’s staffers told the paper of a discussion group organized by their fellow workers to discuss the implications of the non-disparagement clause, which many signed as a condition for employment. Dozens of employees took part, some of them openly criticizing it with references to the dystopian surveillance state featured in George Orwell’s “1984.”
Though questions are swirling over whether Google’s top brass would ever invoke the clause to go after staff — or if Google even could, legally speaking — workers say the agreements go too far regardless.
As one DeepMind staffer told WaPo, even “if it’s not enforceable,” the attempted gag order speaks for itself: “the reason is to basically intimidate people.”
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