The Role of In-house Lawyers regarding In-house AI Ethics Research at Alphabet/Google Alphabet Inc., the parent company of the search engine company Google, conducts intensive in-house research on its products and services, including ethical research. Much of that research is of high quality and published in academic outlets and presented at international conferences. In December 2020 and February 2021 respectively, Google dismissed Margaret Mitchell and Timnit Gebru, who had both co-led Google's ethics in artificial intelligence team for about two years. This occurred following various controversies that go back to Gebru and Mitchell publishing a paper on ethical problems and biases in large language models (LLMs) with the title "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" (see at https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3442188.3445922). LLMs are statistical models which assign a probability to a sequence of words and are trained on massive datasets. The huge scale increases the ability of ai to recognize and generate fluent natural language. The article had initially passed Google's internal review systems, but eventually caught the attention of Google's top management that felt uncomfortable with the research that also included the LLM "BERT", an LLM that is leveraged by Google's search engine. Google has updated its internal procedures by introducing a "sensitive topics" review for studies dealing with biases in its services. We have little information about this review process. Jeffrey Dastin and Paresh Dave writing for Reuters, claim, however, that Reuters had obtained an internal email of a Google researcher who complains about the review process, in particular about lawyers editing his academic research work (see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-research-exclusive- idUSKBN2APIAC) In the cited Reuters article we can read: "An internal email, seen by Reuters, offered fresh detail on Google researchers' concerns, showing exactly how Google's legal department had modified one of the three AI papers, called "Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models." (bit.ly/3dLOoQi) The email, dated Feb. 8, from a co-author of the paper, Nicholas Carlini, went to hundreds of colleagues, seeking to draw their attention to what he called "deeply insidious" edits by company lawyers.\"Let's be clear here,\" the roughly 1,200-word email said. \"When we as academics write that we have a 'concern' or nd something 'worrying' and a Google lawyer requires that we change it to sound nicer, this is very much Big Brother stepping in.\" Required edits, according to his email, included \"negative-to-neutral\" swaps such as changing the word \"concerns\" to \"considerations,\" and \"dangers\" to \"risks.\" Lawyers also required deleting references to Google technology; the authors' nding that Al leaked copyrighted content; and the words \"breach\" and \"sensitive,\" the email said. Carlini did not respond to requests for comment. Google in answer to questions about the email disputed its contention that lawyers were trying to control the paper's tone. The company said it had no issues with the topics investigated by the paper, but it found some legal terms used inaccurately and conducted a thorough edit as a result.\" Task: 0n the one hand, it is understandable that a company like Alphabet and its subsidiary Google seeks to protect its image and economic interests. Yet these companies' values depend on their cutting-edge research and research ought to respect principles of scientic objectivity and make results known to everyone. Let us suppose that it is true that lawyers are vetting research papers that are produced in Google's in-house research departments. Provide an ethical analysis of an in-house lawyer working for Google, who undertakes thorough language edits of academic research papers in order to remove potentially negative references to Google's technologies. Based on your argumentation, how should lawyers, if at all, review in-house ai-ethics research that is bound for publication? If you use outside sources for your argumentation, please provide a full reference in a footnote and add a bibliography of the sources you refer to in your analysis