About Me

Current job title: AI Ethicist / Product Manager

Current location:  NYC

Years of Experience: 3.5 Years

Total Comp: $265,000

Current position description:

• So my current title is a few things first is of course an AI ethicist  & the other side of it is outbound product manager. What this means is that all the generative, AI offerings, that happen at Google Cloud and industry solutions. I help mitigate for bias harm and make sure that they’re going to be doing more social good than social harm and also figuring out what those harms might be. So this includes our entire suite of generative  AI products and products inside of generative AI. My role is twofold. One is customer focus to mitigate the harm of AI bias but second is product focused to proactively build non-bias AI products.

How I Got Here:

• My first interaction with Google, interview wise, I was actually interviewing for Google.org which is our philanthropy arm.  I remember, I did that interview and I felt like I literally killed it. It was one of those interviews when you walk away knowing you got it. A week later, I got the notification that I didn’t get it.
• But they said I did so well over the interview they wanted to put me on another team. So they actually plugged into people ops which is our HR department. And I got that role. Got to Google. I worked in policy so I switched out of the internship full-time into the legal team. I ended up ironically working at Google.org for a year on strategy. So I was doing all the operational strategy work behind our 300 million dollar portfolio of grants in 2020 with things like Covid-19 and criminal justice reform. I just started working on all kinds of stuff about climate issues, from there, I bounced around. About a year and a half ago, I was with the Cloud AI team doing ethics in product management. So, it’s been a crazy ride.

What specifically are you doing to ensure AI is being built ethically?

• I am ensuring the customer and end user have more transparency into how AI is being built. There’s a huge learning gap with AI, right? It’s so easy for it to feel like a magical black box, where you type in ChatGPT and it gives you this magical answer to do all these kinds of things. But at the end of the day, there are things that can be explained with these systems that make them feel more digestible and help customers understand what’s going on. Because something goes wrong and you want to make sure that they have the kind of tooling transparency and also just safeguards in place to be able to fix it without having to come back to us. 

Tips/Tools

What resources were most beneficial on your journey?

• This book called Mastery by Robert Greene. It’s all about what it really means to spend 10,000 hours of your life doing something or dedicating yourself to something. And it actually goes to a bunch of different stories of people throughout history and just how they came to be as like the icons that they are.
• Deep Work by Cal Newport, It’s about the art of focusing and just connecting when you want to do something or accomplish something.
• And lastly, having a community and family around you that make you feel like you can do anything is super important.

What advice would you give your younger self?

• You don’t need to learn everything before you start something, just get started. There’s no difference in analyzing, observing, deep-thinking etc. All of that is not starting and simply analysis paralysis. Many won’t start something because they don’t know their direction or all the pertinent information. You learn the most when you start and the ability to change your mind especially when new information is present is freeing and something that should be embraced. Never believe you know everything and if you do you’re in the wrong space. You have to feel empowered and comfortable not being the smartest person in the room.

What excites you most about AI?

• The fact that it can be applied to anything. Like it’s just completely endless and I think for me that goes back to the fact that I just love things that I can’t learn everything about and AI is something where I could talk about healthcare and retail and gaming and creative things like everything. And we could talk about that specific application for hours for days, like it’s endless. And so that just makes me feel excited about being at the forefront of something that’s new and fresh. I love that feeling. I think that’s probably the biggest thing that I’m passionate about.

What scares you with AI?

• My biggest fear with AI is capitalism driving innovation. When there’s capital behind innovation there’s a limit to who gets to innovate and there will be those who get gatekept. Typically the underrepresented and underfunded are left out of driving innovation and we’re stuck on the receiving end of bias and unethical products. This is why it’s important for our community to take action in learning about AI while there’s still relative parity in the field.

What’s next?

• I want to start building my own AI products. I feel like I’ve been a part of that process, you know, doing up on product management at Google, you know, like I help build products internally. I help watch them with customers and figure out use cases, and all that kind of stuff, but I would love to  explore that a little bit harder. I’m also launching my own startup/creative studio which explores the synergy between AI and creative fields in an ethical practice. 
• I want to put AI back in the hands of people that are potentially being impacted by it the most by finding really new ways to enhance fan engagement, and interact with art. The way that I think about our creative processes in an ethical way that’s like just really important to me and I’ve done a lot of work. I have actually my first client coming up really excited. Can’t speak too much about it. I plan to have more information about it this summer especially for my NYC peeps.

Overall reflections/thoughts to share/advice:

Don’t shape your career around a degree but shape it around your passions and experiences. I went to an ivy league institution and studied law but it wasn’t until I experienced racism through the vehicle of technology that I knew I could make a bigger impact in the world.

Quotes:

• Days after Trump was elected, there was someone who anonymously added all the black students to a groupchat and continuously trolled us with racial slurs. We couldn’t figure out who it was and how they found all of us. The biggest barrier to answering these questions was technology. At the time I was pursuing law to have an impact on social change but that experience is what led me to pursuing a tech career. I realized that tech had more control of sociology, ethics, and our day-to-day life than anything and I wanted to make my impact in this arena.
• My biggest fear with AI is capitalism driving innovation. When there’s capital behind innovation there’s a limit to who gets to innovate and there will be those who get gatekept. Typically the underrepresented and underfunded are left out of driving innovation and we’re stuck on the receiving end of bias and unethical products. This is why it’s important for our community to take action in learning about AI while there’s still relative parity in the field.