So I've just tested it, and I can confirm, yes, copilot refuses to give suggestions related to gender. Now I know a lot of people are calling this absurd, but looking more closely, there are two PR nightmare scenarios.
1. Copilot makes a suggestion that implies gender is binary, a certain community explodes with anger and an entire news hype cycle starts about how Microsoft is enforcing views on gender with code.
2. Copilot makes a suggestion that implies gender is nonbinary, a certain community explodes with anger and an entire news hype cycle starts...
You can't win... so why not plea the fifth?
To all those claiming this is an example of "wokeism", remember the proper response from an individual who believes in nonbinary gender would be to offer suggestions of the sort. There is no advocacy here. Mums the word.
Those aren’t the only options. You can just let it suggest what it is going to suggest. Copilot is a product for adults who should be able to comprehend what machine learning is. Anybody who throws a fit about it will only be exposing themselves as a fool.
Agreed. The answer is approved by Dave Cheney, he works at GitHub, and if you've ever attended one of his talks it's plain to see he's a very scrupulous person. I also don't think this is an example of Microsoft taking a side; rather I read it as them refusing to bat, which seems fine.
What I would've preferred one of these threads to be about is how all of this works. Like, how do they post-hoc filter certain things? Is that the only way to deal with things defined as issues in ML?
I don't get the whole discussion. There are just many different models of gender. Its like particles vs waves. In one model, there are only two genders, in another five. There are those who say gender is culture and sex is real, and those who say sex is constructed, too. Some models describe reality better than others, some are useful, some are harmful. But nobody can or should stop you from thinking about reality with the model of your choice.
If I were Microsoft, I would post a shrugie and say copilot offers arbitrary responses based on the actual code it reads; it is not supposed to be "correct" or good or fair, but just follow what it sees other people do.
I'm going to have to say it is ridiculous because there are all sorts of things that cause problems that the copilot generated code is going to have to keep out following this reasoning -
let's not handle ethnicity, if we're going to be sensitive about gender that is an area which is also sensitive for many people.
should it take border disputes etc. into consideration, if you're using it in country X and country X thinks a particular area belongs to them despite most of the world disagreeing will you not be able to use copilot to generate code that supports your remote employers international operations?
it would make better sense if Copilot had warnings it could issue and when you wanted gender put up some sort of warning about that - or allow you to choose binary gender / multi gender solutions.
The idea that it should fail, and that makes sense for it to do so is essentially a critique of the whole code generation idea.
on edit: obviously HN should be able to come up with lots of other things that might cause media related problems if CoPilot handled it, code to detect slurs, etc. etc.
Solution: let the user choose their political stance on such a polarized topic in the Copilot settings so that the user gets suggestions that fit his stance.
It's a total nonsense, how can someone be angry at a soulless machine?
Is it a real thing to face anger towards an AI like it was a real human?
It's a serious mental problem then, cause the anger is actually directed inward in this case
They fixed Copilot returning verbatim snippet of Quake source code by just blacklisting a word! How can they still pretend Copilot is not just copyright washing other people's code?
Interesting, so it might not be the specific token "gender" but rather blocked words ("man" or "woman") that appear in suggestions will suppress Copilot. And presumably another token that like "communist" might do the same...
There’s a zealous push by a small but extremely vocal fringe to impose their very particular worldview onto emerging AI/ML models like this.
They refer to it as “eliminating bias”, but it’s really just an attempt to mold these new technologies into conformance with one very specific set of ideological commitments.
Proponents view it as some kind of obvious universal good, and are confused when anyone else is appalled by the blind foolishness of it all.
I don't think it's silly. Whatever Copilot says, is said by Microsoft too, by extension. And so, it makes sense for Microsoft to not make themselves liable for whatever people make their product spit out. Especially after happenings like this:
"Microsoft's AI Twitter bot goes dark after racist, sexist tweets"
I find this filter to be a fine concept. It can prevent automated vulgarity generation if used correctly. However, that filter should be manageable by the user, not hashed and encoded in some weird scheme. Just put down a file called "bad words.txt" and let the user pick their preferred amount of AI suppression.
Besides the absurdity of the code crashing because of the word "gender". My problem and curiosity with all of this is...
"What was going on in the head of the person writing the parser?"
I mean, were they thinking that if someone is writing code, let's say, for a gender dropdown and it was only ["male", "female"], it would try to suggest to us to add 26 more genders instead (and worse, suggest a list of genders to add)?
Would the intention be to correct us and popup a message saying "We suggest you add more genders so as not to displease the users of your product"??
What was going on in that person's head who is trying to do all of this? What was their thought process? What were they trying to accomplish around gender?
Was it the programmer, or some product manager that insisted on some kind of "copilot adjustment" for this because of a personal political viewpoint or just for GitHub being more woke?
Regardless of what Copilot suggested for "gender", it would've offended someone, and I think that's what Microsoft wants to avoid. Not even woke so much as it is trying to avoid potential controversies.
> I mean, were they thinking that if someone is writing code, let's say, for a gender dropdown and it was only ["male", "female"], it would try to suggest to us to add 26 more genders instead (and worse, suggest a list of genders to add)?
> Would the intention be to correct us and popup a message saying "We suggest you add more genders so as not to displease the users of your product"??
You can just as easily assume that they don't want a dropdown with 26 additional genders to just pop up automatically. That would upset a lot of people, many of whom are in this thread. I think whoever wrote the code doesn't want to jump into a political shitstorm.
The ____ church did interfere in all matters of life, big and small, none to trivial to no be guided by a enormous ritual rule book, always threatening disciplinary actions by the believing masses and social ostracizing.
Hurting the feelings of the true believers, was the ultimate sin, a sin often committed, but only punished if the sinner did not recant and change his ways, in a brutally public and official way. It was there, that the ____ church revealed what it was really all about all along. Societal control, maybe with good intentions to start with, but in the end, just control for its own sake and to prevent others from archieving the same control.
Not saying, that any social movement could turn into a religion. That would need strange clothing, processions, rituals, codified language and most of all a mythology.
I have no religious preference, im on the side of science and would like to have a civil society, were no member is violated by another. I would very much prefer it, if the combatant religions involved, could leave science alone. Reality is often disappointing.
May the religion with the least suffering caused win and then keep away from the state & power.
I encountered this some time ago because I was working with grammatical gender. Unlike many of these comments, though, I do not take exception to it. Bias in ML is well established, and it's okay if, when we don't have solutions, we just disable it.
If your autocomplete was capable of spitting out suggestions that made you feel isolated or kept poking you in the eye about aspects of your identity, you might feel a bit better about the creators having thought about that and taken steps to avoid it happening.
"Reducing Bias" is a really strange way to put it, considering that bias usually means delibeaterly ignoring or contradicting aspects of reality/data (the classic example in ML textbooks is fitting a straight line to non-linear data), which is what Copilot is quite literally doing here.
Gender is, in actual material fact, binary, and extremely strongly correlated with sex. Building a crimestop into an ML model is just teaching the machine human biases and delusions.
I worked on a video game in the late 2000s, and one of the bits of code I did was the code for filling the seats in the stadium with people. One of the artists cobbled together like 5 low poly man models and 5 low poly woman models, and you could just about tell the difference, and I put some code in there to ensure the genders were evenly distributed. (The 2 genders, I mean. Man, and woman.)
Looking back, I don't even know why I made it an enum, rather than a 1-bit bitfield called is_woman - but in the end I was glad I didn't, because the art director moaned a bit about the clothing colour distribution, and somebody asked if we could have some mascots, and there were some complaints about the unreasonable number of interesting hats. And, so, long story short, by the time we were done, we had 18 genders based on clothing colour and type of hat, 2 genders for mascot (naturally: tall, and squat), and a table to control the relative distributions.
Once we got to 5 genders I tried to change the enum name to Type - but we had this data-driven reflection system that integrated with various parts of the art pipeline, and once your enum had a name, that was pretty much that. You were stuck with it.
Is that a metaphor for our times too? I don't know. My own view is that sometimes stuff just happens, and you can't read too much into it.
Social media amplifies an innocuous, extremely low stakes occurrence into a heated discussion because it happened to misstate the facts (nothing is crashing here) and focus on a hot button keyword ("gender" is only one of many blocked words)?
So large language model are great on but have undesirable result occasionally. Hand coded scripts are added to remove the undesirable outcomes but still produce other problems - crashed but less often.
More and more things are going to be filtered through large language model apps and the possibilities for cascading failures will be even more interesting than what exists presently.
I was able to get GPT-3 to spit out reasonably accurate biographies for a couple of composers I know.
GPT-3 could go even further — one of my composer friends has a reasonably rare first name, and when given the prompt "There once was a man named $first_name", GPT-3 responded with a number of limericks tailored to his particular set of skills.
I encountered this when writing some scripts for Latin-language text processing (which dealt with grammatical gender). Thankfully the Latin-native term 'genus' passed the Copilot smell-test and I could continue with my work. I found it pretty amusing.
What was that bot that MSFT stood up on Twitter that trolls and memers fed to turn alt-right? I know they eventually took it down and that it stirred up a lot of controversy.
I would not be surprised if someone found some Copilot output stemming from "gender" and reported to MSFT/GitHub for them to simply short circuit or "break" after finding certain keywords.
Yeah they probably found something like: assert gender in ["male", "female"]. If this is enough to trigger a backlash then maybe we deserve whatever fate has in store for us.
Content filters on ML feel so silly. I assume the goal is to avoid bad press? Because the... "attack" would be someone generating offensive material, which they could just write themselves, not to mention I have serious doubts that any filter is going to be a serious barrier.
For images/ video I can see merit, ex: using that nudity inference project on images of children, but text seems particularly pointless.
The point is because sometimes even a perfectly reasonable inference from an ML model would be considered a big mistake due to societal considerations that are unknown to the model.
For example, a couple years ago, there was a big hubbub over a Google Image labeler that labeled a black man and woman as "gorillas". A mistake for sure, but the headlines about the algorithm being "racist" were wrong. The algorithm was certainly incorrect, and it could probably have been argued that one reason it was wrong is that its training set contained fewer black people than white people, but the algorithm was certainly unaware of the historical context around this being a racist description.
Similarly, in the early days of Google driving directions I remember one commenter saying something along the lines of "You can tell that no black engineers work at Google" because it pronounced "Malcolm X Boulevard" as "Malcolm 10 Boulevard". Of course, the vast majority of time you see a lone "X" in a street address it is pronounced "ten".
It's kind of analogous to the "uncanny valley" problem in graphics. When the algorithm gets things mostly right, people think of it as "human-like", and so when it makes a mistake, people attribute human logic to it (it's quite safe to assume that a human labeling a picture of black people as gorillas is racist), as opposed to the plain statistical inferences ML models make.
Imagine that you had a co-worker who seemed totally normal 90% of the time... But about once a week, someone would bring up a topic that made them go full nazi or attempt to seduce their coworker. That's where we are with LLM-based generative text. It's not (just) about PR, it's about putting guardrails around the many many many circumstances the tech can do harm or just seem ignorant.
What is Github worried about? That Copilot might suggest some code that checks for a "gender" variable being only one of two values? Utterly absurd that we've now reached this point. I already had plenty of reasons to boycott Copilot, now I have another one.
I added "gender" (an IANA registered JWT claim) to my JWT payload schema and found Copilot will not provide any suggestions after that. Not on the same line, nor in the rest of the file. After removing the word gender entirely, it works again.
So, I tested this locally and for the first time, immediately after using a variable named “gender”, it stopped suggesting.
I wonder if this is to prevent it from accidentally processing PII or PHI data. Maybe someone else who didn’t get their account on some kind of cooldown can try it with “birthdate” or “DOB” or “SSN”. I highly doubt this has anything to do with gender being a controversial or blocked term for political reasons or something.
I just tried Copilot with VS Code and python for the first time. If I define a function with some parameter name, I get suggestions as I type the body. I change the parameter name to gender, no suggestions. I change one letter in the parameter name (gendes, gander), I get suggestions again. There clearly is some code that gets activated when it sees the word "gender".
I belong to a local Atlanta Slack channel - tech404 - that for the longest had an official bot that would always respond with the waving hand emoji (HN doesn’t support emojis) if you ever said the word “guys”. Even in private channels.
GitHub Copilot includes filters to block offensive language in the prompts and to avoid synthesizing suggestions in sensitive contexts. We continue to work on improving the filter system to more intelligently detect and remove offensive outputs. However, due to the novel space of code safety, GitHub Copilot may sometimes produce undesired output. If you see offensive outputs, please report them directly to copilot-safety@github.com so that we can improve our safeguards. GitHub takes this challenge very seriously and we are committed to addressing it.
An earlier version of the list that someone found (see https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=32339001 for links) does contain "gender", "slavery" and "master race" but not "master" and "slave" itself, ironically.
> So can I put "gender" as the first line in my code to stop copilot from ingesting it altogether
This means one solution for those worried about copilot laundering around code licenses is to put a statement like "for more details check the man page" at the end of each docstring.
It's gonna come soon enough. The backlash is already mounting.
I'm just honestly super exhausted by any of the insanity right now, not even only regarding this topic. It's just complete black-and-white thinking these days, no matter about what it is. Extremes only. The stronger your opinion the better, how else would you feel like you exist? Almost no one with a rational, centered overarching perspective. Twenty years ago 50% of the current population would've been considered as possibly having BPD.
I don't really find it that funny. I don't think the correct response to everyone being upset by this (from many different angles) is to stand back from it and laugh at it.
Some people feel that wokeness is ruining the world. I can't really speak to that position because my political initialization was on the other side of the cultural gulf in America.
The way I have come to understand transgender issues is very much shaped by the political left, but also by a religious upbringing (Catholic, Jesuit). On the left, I am told that this is a human rights issue. I am inclined to believe that transgender people have a hard time in life. I am also inclined to believe that it is not a mental disorder, and I came to these conclusions through conversations with transgender people I have worked with in the past, as well as through what I learned in my psychology classes in high school and college.
I am a white male who was born that way, but I definitely know what it feels like to be ridiculed, to not belong and to feel that there is no right place for me in this world. I have been abused, made to feel small, ostracized and bullied. Those experiences have given me a pretty deep understanding of what suffering is, and how it can be caused. It has also softened me and made me pretty empathetic to others who feel they don't belong in this world.
As an example, I was once at a comedy show where a comedian made a transgender-adjacent joke. The humor of the joke was all in a stupid pun, and I thought it was pretty funny because I like stupid puns. But there was a transgender woman in the audience who got immediately angry. I don't remember exactly what she said, but it was something along the lines of "That's not funny, I'm sick of people like you shouting at me in the street!!". If I had to go though my life having people shouting at me in the streets of NYC because of how I looked vs how other people thought I should look, I may have responded in the same way. I thought the joke was funny, but for her it touched on some deeply painful memories of abuse, dragged them to the surface, and activated a lightning-quick temper. Perhaps if I'd been abused for as long as she, and in the same way, I wouldn't have thought the joke was funny either.
I understand people don't like being corrected, or told that they're wrong or that they're hateful. I don't think that is a productive way to bring about change; and yet, I have found myself picking fights with my parents, and getting generally nasty when they have failed to understand some value I have learned that I did not learn from them. That is obviously a bad thing, because the message they come away with is "what a jerk!" or "those damn lefties!". What I'd rather have people come away with after they hear me speak is something quite different. It was only after raging at my parents enough times that I decided I just wouldn't talk to my parents about politics. There is more right about my parents than there is wrong about them; they are getting older and their bodies will decline until they die. Most likely it will happen to them before it happens to me, at a time when I am able in body and mind, so I intend (even though I sometimes fail) to spend the rest of our time together as peacefully as possible.
I offer this earnestly in good faith. Sometimes the message gets muddied in the delivery, or because I get upset when I perceive (or sometimes, misperceive) that someone is being uncaring for those who are already suffering enough. I think I react that way because of my own history of abuse.
I am also open to hearing the other side of this story. I have attempted not to misrepresent $OTHER_SIDE's view of things. I am only speaking to why I have such strong feelings about this issue. I am sure others have equally strong feelings on another side, and I am open to hearing what that sounds like, provided the viewpoint is offered with respect.
I wouldn't be entirely surprised if something like this was intentional, or that they intentionally filtered the word "gender" and an unintentional side effect was the program crashing.
You literally can't make any statements about gender, no matter how benign, without pissing at least a few of your users off.
Has it been somehow confirmed that this was the cause of the issue or was it just that one guy's speculation? I don't see anything that confirmed this as the cause. Am I missing something in the linked content?
There’s no reason to be surprised that elements within GitHub have an agenda. They’ve been clear about it since changing support for git’s master branch to main and then gaslighting the portion of community that doesn’t use the terminal about it.
Now I’ve got Gen-Z developers that are confused and upset when `git init` does what it’s always done.
GitHub, Microsoft ownership notwithstanding, was always going to inject its employees’ politics into Copilot.
It seems pretty reproducible. I can’t use copilot but if anyone can reproduce it here that’d be cool. Anyhow, assuming this is reproducible and they do have filters to stop certain words giving predictions it leads that they’re trying to avoid the racist Twitter AI incident happening to them. I find that pretty funny :)
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
fny|3 years ago
1. Copilot makes a suggestion that implies gender is binary, a certain community explodes with anger and an entire news hype cycle starts about how Microsoft is enforcing views on gender with code.
2. Copilot makes a suggestion that implies gender is nonbinary, a certain community explodes with anger and an entire news hype cycle starts...
You can't win... so why not plea the fifth?
To all those claiming this is an example of "wokeism", remember the proper response from an individual who believes in nonbinary gender would be to offer suggestions of the sort. There is no advocacy here. Mums the word.
onionisafruit|3 years ago
kodah|3 years ago
What I would've preferred one of these threads to be about is how all of this works. Like, how do they post-hoc filter certain things? Is that the only way to deal with things defined as issues in ML?
captainmuon|3 years ago
If I were Microsoft, I would post a shrugie and say copilot offers arbitrary responses based on the actual code it reads; it is not supposed to be "correct" or good or fair, but just follow what it sees other people do.
philipswood|3 years ago
A certain community explodes with anger since their machine learning dev-tooling is closed and has arbitrary restrictions.
If you try to please everybody, someone won't like it.
bryanrasmussen|3 years ago
let's not handle ethnicity, if we're going to be sensitive about gender that is an area which is also sensitive for many people.
should it take border disputes etc. into consideration, if you're using it in country X and country X thinks a particular area belongs to them despite most of the world disagreeing will you not be able to use copilot to generate code that supports your remote employers international operations?
it would make better sense if Copilot had warnings it could issue and when you wanted gender put up some sort of warning about that - or allow you to choose binary gender / multi gender solutions.
The idea that it should fail, and that makes sense for it to do so is essentially a critique of the whole code generation idea.
on edit: obviously HN should be able to come up with lots of other things that might cause media related problems if CoPilot handled it, code to detect slurs, etc. etc.
nonethewiser|3 years ago
coffeeblack|3 years ago
wseqyrku|3 years ago
hjkl0|3 years ago
How would that work though? What can Copilot suggest that can imply that?
xupybd|3 years ago
But I agree you can't avoid offending people. The world is nuts everything is offensive to someone.
q-big|3 years ago
poulpy123|3 years ago
And also: give the list of banned words
asojfdowgh|3 years ago
TeeMassive|3 years ago
zasdffaa|3 years ago
[deleted]
gloosx|3 years ago
moyix|3 years ago
https://twitter.com/moyix/status/1433254293352730628
avian|3 years ago
https://twitter.com/moyix/status/1433261377125326851
throwaway290|3 years ago
LAC-Tech|3 years ago
We're zeroing in on how silly is it for copilot to trigger its content filter on the word "gender".
To me the real issue is that copilot has a content filter in the first place. It's unwelcome and unnecessary.
camdenlock|3 years ago
They refer to it as “eliminating bias”, but it’s really just an attempt to mold these new technologies into conformance with one very specific set of ideological commitments.
Proponents view it as some kind of obvious universal good, and are confused when anyone else is appalled by the blind foolishness of it all.
npteljes|3 years ago
"Microsoft's AI Twitter bot goes dark after racist, sexist tweets"
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-twitter-bot-idU...
xupybd|3 years ago
For example https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...
jeroenhd|3 years ago
wseqyrku|3 years ago
If you have to deal with those kind of people, you're willing to sound silly just to protect yourself.
nonethewiser|3 years ago
eric4smith|3 years ago
"What was going on in the head of the person writing the parser?"
I mean, were they thinking that if someone is writing code, let's say, for a gender dropdown and it was only ["male", "female"], it would try to suggest to us to add 26 more genders instead (and worse, suggest a list of genders to add)?
Would the intention be to correct us and popup a message saying "We suggest you add more genders so as not to displease the users of your product"??
What was going on in that person's head who is trying to do all of this? What was their thought process? What were they trying to accomplish around gender?
Was it the programmer, or some product manager that insisted on some kind of "copilot adjustment" for this because of a personal political viewpoint or just for GitHub being more woke?
That's the most troubling aspect to this.
I hope to Jesus Christ it was just a mistake.
ronsor|3 years ago
fugalfervor|3 years ago
> Would the intention be to correct us and popup a message saying "We suggest you add more genders so as not to displease the users of your product"??
You can just as easily assume that they don't want a dropdown with 26 additional genders to just pop up automatically. That would upset a lot of people, many of whom are in this thread. I think whoever wrote the code doesn't want to jump into a political shitstorm.
winReInstall|3 years ago
Hurting the feelings of the true believers, was the ultimate sin, a sin often committed, but only punished if the sinner did not recant and change his ways, in a brutally public and official way. It was there, that the ____ church revealed what it was really all about all along. Societal control, maybe with good intentions to start with, but in the end, just control for its own sake and to prevent others from archieving the same control.
Not saying, that any social movement could turn into a religion. That would need strange clothing, processions, rituals, codified language and most of all a mythology.
I have no religious preference, im on the side of science and would like to have a civil society, were no member is violated by another. I would very much prefer it, if the combatant religions involved, could leave science alone. Reality is often disappointing.
May the religion with the least suffering caused win and then keep away from the state & power.
c3534l|3 years ago
Thorentis|3 years ago
nonethewiser|3 years ago
jcuenod|3 years ago
If your autocomplete was capable of spitting out suggestions that made you feel isolated or kept poking you in the eye about aspects of your identity, you might feel a bit better about the creators having thought about that and taken steps to avoid it happening.
nonethewiser|3 years ago
[deleted]
Banana699|3 years ago
Gender is, in actual material fact, binary, and extremely strongly correlated with sex. Building a crimestop into an ML model is just teaching the machine human biases and delusions.
nomilk|3 years ago
A metaphor for our times.
tom_|3 years ago
Looking back, I don't even know why I made it an enum, rather than a 1-bit bitfield called is_woman - but in the end I was glad I didn't, because the art director moaned a bit about the clothing colour distribution, and somebody asked if we could have some mascots, and there were some complaints about the unreasonable number of interesting hats. And, so, long story short, by the time we were done, we had 18 genders based on clothing colour and type of hat, 2 genders for mascot (naturally: tall, and squat), and a table to control the relative distributions.
Once we got to 5 genders I tried to change the enum name to Type - but we had this data-driven reflection system that integrated with various parts of the art pipeline, and once your enum had a name, that was pretty much that. You were stuck with it.
Is that a metaphor for our times too? I don't know. My own view is that sometimes stuff just happens, and you can't read too much into it.
magicalist|3 years ago
> A metaphor for our times.
Social media amplifies an innocuous, extremely low stakes occurrence into a heated discussion because it happened to misstate the facts (nothing is crashing here) and focus on a hot button keyword ("gender" is only one of many blocked words)?
joe_the_user|3 years ago
More and more things are going to be filtered through large language model apps and the possibilities for cascading failures will be even more interesting than what exists presently.
muglug|3 years ago
I was able to get GPT-3 to spit out reasonably accurate biographies for a couple of composers I know.
GPT-3 could go even further — one of my composer friends has a reasonably rare first name, and when given the prompt "There once was a man named $first_name", GPT-3 responded with a number of limericks tailored to his particular set of skills.
nonethewiser|3 years ago
jan_Inkepa|3 years ago
duskwuff|3 years ago
(The word in question is "race" -- as seen in the phrase "race condition".)
jcuenod|3 years ago
TheSpiciestDev|3 years ago
I would not be surprised if someone found some Copilot output stemming from "gender" and reported to MSFT/GitHub for them to simply short circuit or "break" after finding certain keywords.
Thorentis|3 years ago
npteljes|3 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)
nevster|3 years ago
hda2|3 years ago
staticassertion|3 years ago
For images/ video I can see merit, ex: using that nudity inference project on images of children, but text seems particularly pointless.
hn_throwaway_99|3 years ago
For example, a couple years ago, there was a big hubbub over a Google Image labeler that labeled a black man and woman as "gorillas". A mistake for sure, but the headlines about the algorithm being "racist" were wrong. The algorithm was certainly incorrect, and it could probably have been argued that one reason it was wrong is that its training set contained fewer black people than white people, but the algorithm was certainly unaware of the historical context around this being a racist description.
Similarly, in the early days of Google driving directions I remember one commenter saying something along the lines of "You can tell that no black engineers work at Google" because it pronounced "Malcolm X Boulevard" as "Malcolm 10 Boulevard". Of course, the vast majority of time you see a lone "X" in a street address it is pronounced "ten".
It's kind of analogous to the "uncanny valley" problem in graphics. When the algorithm gets things mostly right, people think of it as "human-like", and so when it makes a mistake, people attribute human logic to it (it's quite safe to assume that a human labeling a picture of black people as gorillas is racist), as opposed to the plain statistical inferences ML models make.
ace2358|3 years ago
https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...
evrydayhustling|3 years ago
brew-hacker|3 years ago
This is absolutely silly. Solid work GitHub team!
Bolkan|3 years ago
[deleted]
Thorentis|3 years ago
mcphage|3 years ago
Perhaps Github is worried about a backlash if it suggests code that allows for more than 2 values.
stolen_biscuit|3 years ago
_zllx|3 years ago
https://www.iana.org/assignments/jwt/jwt.xhtml
readyplayeremma|3 years ago
I wonder if this is to prevent it from accidentally processing PII or PHI data. Maybe someone else who didn’t get their account on some kind of cooldown can try it with “birthdate” or “DOB” or “SSN”. I highly doubt this has anything to do with gender being a controversial or blocked term for political reasons or something.
diego|3 years ago
tgsovlerkhgsel|3 years ago
bobsmooth|3 years ago
sergiomattei|3 years ago
scarface74|3 years ago
LAC-Tech|3 years ago
I'm pretty sure a bot would swoop in and say something like "NO LOL" which ironically only encourage more LOL.
int_19h|3 years ago
leetrout|3 years ago
Does GitHub Copilot produce offensive outputs?
GitHub Copilot includes filters to block offensive language in the prompts and to avoid synthesizing suggestions in sensitive contexts. We continue to work on improving the filter system to more intelligently detect and remove offensive outputs. However, due to the novel space of code safety, GitHub Copilot may sometimes produce undesired output. If you see offensive outputs, please report them directly to copilot-safety@github.com so that we can improve our safeguards. GitHub takes this challenge very seriously and we are committed to addressing it.
djbusby|3 years ago
The bugs apparent trigger word is close to hot-button poli-sci issue. Can we please focus on the Technology.
CoastalCoder|3 years ago
I totally agree that this story has a high risk of flamewars.
But it definitely has heavy Technology component, too.
nonethewiser|3 years ago
krapp|3 years ago
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btbuildem|3 years ago
Are there any other break-words? Master, slave, Carlin's seven words, etc?
tgsovlerkhgsel|3 years ago
rgoulter|3 years ago
This means one solution for those worried about copilot laundering around code licenses is to put a statement like "for more details check the man page" at the end of each docstring.
akomtu|3 years ago
neonsunset|3 years ago
the_doctah|3 years ago
nonethewiser|3 years ago
betwixthewires|3 years ago
Mo3|3 years ago
I'm just honestly super exhausted by any of the insanity right now, not even only regarding this topic. It's just complete black-and-white thinking these days, no matter about what it is. Extremes only. The stronger your opinion the better, how else would you feel like you exist? Almost no one with a rational, centered overarching perspective. Twenty years ago 50% of the current population would've been considered as possibly having BPD.
silisili|3 years ago
fugalfervor|3 years ago
Some people feel that wokeness is ruining the world. I can't really speak to that position because my political initialization was on the other side of the cultural gulf in America.
The way I have come to understand transgender issues is very much shaped by the political left, but also by a religious upbringing (Catholic, Jesuit). On the left, I am told that this is a human rights issue. I am inclined to believe that transgender people have a hard time in life. I am also inclined to believe that it is not a mental disorder, and I came to these conclusions through conversations with transgender people I have worked with in the past, as well as through what I learned in my psychology classes in high school and college.
I am a white male who was born that way, but I definitely know what it feels like to be ridiculed, to not belong and to feel that there is no right place for me in this world. I have been abused, made to feel small, ostracized and bullied. Those experiences have given me a pretty deep understanding of what suffering is, and how it can be caused. It has also softened me and made me pretty empathetic to others who feel they don't belong in this world.
As an example, I was once at a comedy show where a comedian made a transgender-adjacent joke. The humor of the joke was all in a stupid pun, and I thought it was pretty funny because I like stupid puns. But there was a transgender woman in the audience who got immediately angry. I don't remember exactly what she said, but it was something along the lines of "That's not funny, I'm sick of people like you shouting at me in the street!!". If I had to go though my life having people shouting at me in the streets of NYC because of how I looked vs how other people thought I should look, I may have responded in the same way. I thought the joke was funny, but for her it touched on some deeply painful memories of abuse, dragged them to the surface, and activated a lightning-quick temper. Perhaps if I'd been abused for as long as she, and in the same way, I wouldn't have thought the joke was funny either.
I understand people don't like being corrected, or told that they're wrong or that they're hateful. I don't think that is a productive way to bring about change; and yet, I have found myself picking fights with my parents, and getting generally nasty when they have failed to understand some value I have learned that I did not learn from them. That is obviously a bad thing, because the message they come away with is "what a jerk!" or "those damn lefties!". What I'd rather have people come away with after they hear me speak is something quite different. It was only after raging at my parents enough times that I decided I just wouldn't talk to my parents about politics. There is more right about my parents than there is wrong about them; they are getting older and their bodies will decline until they die. Most likely it will happen to them before it happens to me, at a time when I am able in body and mind, so I intend (even though I sometimes fail) to spend the rest of our time together as peacefully as possible.
I offer this earnestly in good faith. Sometimes the message gets muddied in the delivery, or because I get upset when I perceive (or sometimes, misperceive) that someone is being uncaring for those who are already suffering enough. I think I react that way because of my own history of abuse.
I am also open to hearing the other side of this story. I have attempted not to misrepresent $OTHER_SIDE's view of things. I am only speaking to why I have such strong feelings about this issue. I am sure others have equally strong feelings on another side, and I am open to hearing what that sounds like, provided the viewpoint is offered with respect.
drewcoo|3 years ago
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Gigachad|3 years ago
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ttpphd|3 years ago
thakoppno|3 years ago
might work here
tpoacher|3 years ago
subjectsigma|3 years ago
You literally can't make any statements about gender, no matter how benign, without pissing at least a few of your users off.
nonethewiser|3 years ago
wseqyrku|3 years ago
davesque|3 years ago
Msw242|3 years ago
https://twitter.com/moyix/status/1433254293352730628?t=NIpgb...
tzekid|3 years ago
Anyone have any good recommendations for Copilot alternatives?
duxup|3 years ago
anothermoron|3 years ago
You can see it in the original link to the discussion: Answer selected by davecheney
politician|3 years ago
Now I’ve got Gen-Z developers that are confused and upset when `git init` does what it’s always done.
GitHub, Microsoft ownership notwithstanding, was always going to inject its employees’ politics into Copilot.
aaomidi|3 years ago
uhtred|3 years ago
coolspot|3 years ago
nonethewiser|3 years ago
Except some people want to punish others for their opinions. That is the gasoline. And Microsoft is selling gas cans.
coffee_beqn|3 years ago
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throwaway290|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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gloosx|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
flippinburgers|3 years ago
potatototoo99|3 years ago
Tree1993|3 years ago
dang|3 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
unknown|3 years ago
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fuarno-eeple|3 years ago
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Ycombigatorz|3 years ago
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antiquark|3 years ago
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nonethewiser|3 years ago
sn0w_crash|3 years ago
Thorentis|3 years ago
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koshergweilo|3 years ago
eyelidlessness|3 years ago
a_shovel|3 years ago
LAC-Tech|3 years ago
patchtopic|3 years ago
sergiomattei|3 years ago
It’s a comment from a third party speculating over what causes the crash.
alephxyz|3 years ago
> Heargo 24 days ago > Thanks, I'll try as soon as I get the problem again (somehow it's not bugged anymore...).
Looks like it was just a temporary issue with no evidence that's it's due to a word filter.
EddySchauHai|3 years ago
thakoppno|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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