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A former AI employee has filed a lawsuit against Amazon, alleging her Team Director told her to breach its internal copyright rules among other claims of harassment and wrongful termination.
In the lawsuit filed earlier in April, the ex-exec, Dr Viviane Ghaderi, says she held a role as an AI scientist on Amazon’s Large Language Model team. Her responsibilities included escalating violations of Amazon's internal copyright policies to its in-house legal team.
However, according to Ghaderi, she was confronted by her team director, Andrey Styskin, in March 2023, who wished to understand why goals were not being met on a search quality project for Amazon’s Alexa team.
Ghaderi says she explained that delays were due to her compliance with the copyright-related policies, but struggled with a “tension” between the need to raise breaches with a representative from the Legal Department, and direction from Amazon’s upper management.
According to the lawsuit, Styskin rejected Ghaderi’s concerns about Amazon’s internal policies, stating he “instructed her to ignore those policies in pursuit of better results because “everyone else”- i.e., other AI companies - “is doing it.””
There have been several high-profile cases of copyright-related lawsuits against companies developing AI models. Microsoft and OpenAI, for example, are currently embroiled in an intense copyright infringement lawsuit from the New York Times, which claims the tech giants used articles for training data without permission.
Ghaderi’s lawsuit suggests that news stories during 2022 and 2023 alleged that Amazon was playing “catch up” in the AI race, leading to pressure to cut corners.
The filing also details a series of claims from Ghaderi of discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and wrongful termination from Amazon following the AI researcher taking pregnancy leave.
“We do not tolerate discrimination, harassment, or retaliation in our workplace. We investigate any reports of such conduct and take appropriate action against anyone found to have violated our policies,” an Amazon spokesperson has stated.
Ghaderi claims that before taking her pregnancy leave in November 2022, she received promotions and was given maxed-out salaries given her previously strong performance and the high esteem in which her managers held her.
However, according to the suit, upon informing Amazon of her pregnancy, an upcoming promotion was reportedly taken off the table, and after returning from her pregnancy leave, she was subject to harassment and discrimination.
The suit notes that two weeks into Ghaderi’s pregnancy disability leave, OpenAI launched GPT-4, which it claims caused “panic within the organization.”
The AI scientist claims that her requests to continue her career path from before her maternity leave were denied. Performance reviews allegedly did not consider evidence from before her maternity leave and included negative feedback from her manager which did not reflect the views of her peers.
Ghaderi says her complaints to HR did not result in any change, and following a meeting was instead told by Styskin that she would be demoted and stripped of her team.
She alleges that further complaints to HR that the demotion was discrimination and retaliation due to her pregnancy, and that she was being given impossible performance tasks, were not upheld – before she was eventually fired.
The suit was filed in a Los Angeles state court, with a case management conference set to take place on August 14.
