Former Amazon AI research employee claims she was mistreated during birth and told to ignore copyright infringement
Vivian Ghaderi, an AI researcher and engineer at Amazon, is suing the company, alleging that she was demoted and fired after she became pregnant and gave birth. In her lawsuit, Ghaderi claims that she was pressured to take maternity leave and was told to ignore copyright infringements in order to keep up with rivals in AI development.
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Ex-Amazon AI exec claims she was asked to ignore IP law • The Register
Viviane Ghaderi, vs. Amazon.com Services LLC,
(PDF file)
Ghadelli joined the company in 2018, but left in February 2021 to join another startup. However, he was called back to Amazon for his 'excellence and relationships with colleagues,' and became an engineering manager with one researcher and two engineers under him.
In September 2022, Ghadeli will be appointed to lead Alexa's newly launched team investigating data quality and compliance.
At that time, Ghaderi was pregnant and was scheduled to give birth around November 2022. For this reason, Ghaderi reported her pregnancy at her first meeting with her boss, Daniel Marc. Ghaderi had told her previous boss that she was pregnant, but Marc did not seem to know the fact and seemed surprised by the pregnancy announcement.
Mark then temporarily replaced Ghaderi with Mahesh Krishnakumar as leader so that he could continue to manage the team even if Ghaderi took maternity leave, and placed Ghaderi under Krishnakumar.
However, as her due date approached, Ghaderi was scheduled to take maternity leave from November 7, 2022, but Krishnakumar pressured her to delay her leave, and she ended up starting her maternity leave on November 15, the day she was forced to undergo an emergency Caesarean section.
Shortly after this incident, OpenAI released a test version of 'ChatGPT' on November 30, 2022. Ghadelli said that Amazon was in chaos.
ChatGPT, a conversational language model that can recognize mistakes and reject inappropriate requests - GIGAZINE
Ms. Ghaderi returned from maternity leave in January 2023. According to team members, Mr. Krishnakumar was absent from the team most of the time during Ms. Ghaderi's absence, and even if he was present, he made little contribution to the team and work was stalled. In addition, when Ms. Ghaderi returned to work, he made discriminatory and harassing remarks to her, such as, 'I have a young daughter too, so I understand how hard it is for women with babies,' 'You should spend time with your daughter,' and 'You should enjoy being a new mother.'
On the other hand, when Ghaderi asked to return to his promised career path, his boss, Marc, refused, and Andrei Stiskin was appointed as the new team leader. Marc told Ghaderi, 'It's my decision, and you will not return to your previous position.'
Ghaderi, who was put in charge of the large-scale language model project under Stiskin, reported the matter to the legal department due to a violation of copyright policy. However, after meeting with the legal department, Stiskin told Ghaderi that the company had not achieved its goal of improving Alexa's search quality, and that it would have to ignore Amazon's copyright policy in order to improve it. Stiskin suggested that he had received instructions from 'above the legal department,' saying, 'This is what all of our rival AI companies are doing.'
In fact, OpenAI and Microsoft have been sued by authors for copyright infringement.
In March 2023, Ghaderi complained to the human resources department that he was not able to return to his original career. Meanwhile, Stiskin, who met with the AI department executives, said that Ghaderi would be removed from the team and demoted, and after asking Ghaderi how he felt about the decision, he said, 'How do you feel? Do you think they'll say, 'I don't feel anything because (Ghaderi) is German?''
Amazon's human resources department acknowledged that Stiskin's comments did not comply with the company's code of conduct, but did not acknowledge that Ghaderi's claims of discrimination or retaliation against her for her pregnancy or childbirth occurred. They demoted her to a non-performing position, refused to accept her request for a transfer, and fired her after she complained about the HR department.
In response to the lawsuit, Amazon spokesperson Montana McLachlan said, 'We do not tolerate discrimination, harassment or retaliation in the workplace. We investigate such conduct and take appropriate action against anyone who violates our policies.'
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