Timnit Gebru, in a VentureBeat interview:
A lot of people have been talking about that. All of these research conferences are heavily funded by industry, so right now what is computer science research? It’s like you’ve got the military and you’ve got corporations. What are our other options? Like sometimes there’s NIH, but there just needs to be stuff that’s not associated with the military or corporate interests that funds research because inherently there is a conflict of interest. I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be research at corporations. I think there should be, but when you have the kind of things like what you’re seeing with me, and especially with the [research] censorship, and then you see the types of influence they have in these conferences, I think it’s something that people really need to think about.
The problem is that when you do research that requires a lot of resources, this becomes even more of a problem. That’s a little bit of what we talked about in the paper too.
This is the crux of the issue—the deep entanglement of big tech in the AI ethics world. It's a problem across the digital research landscape.