Coworking: Grace Yee thinks about AI ethics (and Girl Scout cookies) during her commute

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

As senior director of ethical innovation (AI ethics and accessibility), I drive Adobe’s global AI ethics governance structure by developing processes, tools, training, and other resources to ensure that our AI solutions reflect our core values. When we talk about AI ethics, we have outlined what that means for Adobe through our AI ethics principles of accountability, responsibility and transparency, but at the end of the day, my job is to make sure that our AI innovations are developed responsibly to deliver outputs that address the needs of our end-users, while minimizing harm and bias.

That means making sure we are training on safe and inclusive datasets, sending all AI-powered features through our AI ethics assessment, and, finally, ensuring high-risk AI features go through our AI Ethics Committee and Review Board.

What’s the most compelling tech project you’ve worked on, and why?

I’ve been at Adobe almost 20 years, but nothing has been more exciting than the creation and execution of our generative AI model Adobe Firefly. It was my team’s job to figure out how we ensure this new technology is trained and brought to market responsibly, and we knew Firefly was only going to be as good as the data on it was trained on. As a company, we decided to only train the model on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content, and public domain content where copyright has expired. Working off a curated data set requires rigorous and continuous testing, but our decision to do so ended up giving us a competitive edge since our model is designed to be commercially safe and mitigates against harmful bias. Ethical review cycles don’t have to slow down innovation—our team was able to strike the balance between developing this technology responsibly and still delivering a tool people would want to use, and it ended up becoming a key differentiator for us.

What technologies are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?

I have a proceed-with-caution perspective when it comes to generative AI—it is simultaneously the most exciting and most fast-paced technology being developed right now, making it even more important to get it right. In a matter of seconds, you can type a prompt into practically any generative AI service and receive an output that suits your needs. This can amplify creativity and help reduce mundane workflows, but without appropriate oversight, AI has the potential to cause harm in society.

Every AI feature that Adobe builds goes through my team’s governance structure before going to market, meaning every day I see firsthand the immense power of this technology. It’s imperative that industry, government, and community work together to address generative AI to ensure we are developing this technology responsibly.

What’s the best tech-related media you read/watch/listen to?

I tend to keep up with tech-related coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, Reuters, etc., and I’m actually not a huge podcast person. I enjoy the silence on the commute, or I’ll just put on the radio. It's those two hours that my best ideas surface—I've come up with innovative mitigations to AI ethics problems and answers to challenging issues during that commute!

What’s something about you we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

I've been trying to build a career to run the Girl Scout Cookie Program for Girl Scouts of Northern California for the last four years. I’m the cookie manager for my daughter’s troop, and I love Girl Scout Cookie season, but it always comes at the busiest time for Adobe—the run-up to Adobe Summit. So it’s like I have two full-time jobs from January through March. I love what I’m doing at Adobe too much, so my cookie dreams are on the back burner for now.

What do you think about when you’re not thinking about tech?

Learning how to swim. As a first-generation American, I never learned how to swim because my parents didn’t enroll me in any swim class. In fact, I failed swimming in high school. I only recently took my first swim class as an adult and just learned how to do freestyle. So I do a lot of internet searching and watch a lot of YouTube videos to figure out how to perfect the stroke and breathing technique so that I can impress my teacher by showing marked improvement with each class.