Live data from Hacker News

Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

vice.com

151–160 of 1001 posts

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#151

Since when is black and white primarily a racial thing anyways? It seems a little inverted, like a black flag or a black mark on an account, it’s not like it’s called “negrolist”, black and white are colors before they are slang for race/culture. Maybe instead of neutering the dictionary we could try a different angle and quit lumping people into “white” or “black”? Some people are Kenyan, Irish, Nigerian, German, no…

This is the hypocrisy of radical leftists in a nutshell. They claim to fight racial thinking while in fact just making it more prominent than it's been in decades.

It's also what will cause the far right to succeed.

The left eats its own rather than being patient or tolerant ("I shouldn't have to teach you!") to people who mean well, while the right allows people to fly way off the handle and still be within their tent because their tent expands to include increasingly extreme ideas.

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#152
post #62

And now the rest of the world will be very happy learn that they will once more have to silently deal with the aftermath of America’s latest political trend. After banning world-famous paintings from Facebook because they dared show a breast, a few well-off engineers and product managers will now pick which English words should remain, and which should be let go. How nice of them. Don’t know what we’d do without them…

It probably won't make you feel any better, but even in America, there is a feeling of SV is shoving its political trends down our collective throat.

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#153
post #22

I've been privy to people trying to ban words like "whitelabel" at my company. Thankfully, management & executives at my company never stood for that BS so I still get to use whitelist & blacklist in documentation, and don't worry about those non-issues get in the way of me actually doing work. Google might be too far gone, and working with those people would be so exhausting that it's actually stopped me from applyi…

whitelist and blacklist are lazy language, even if you ignore the fact that you personally are not bothered by them and you don't have the mental capacity to understand why someone else might be. They carry no intrinsic meaning, and if you can't come up with more descriptive language you are the problem. In all cases you can come up with a better word - include, deny, allow, block, ban, accept, etc. It all depends on…

Nobody was bothered by these words until some jackass told them they should be.

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#154
post #13

One of the reasons I left google is that their "content moderation team" (the folks who make you take down wrongthink memes) is so far out of touch, that somebody had to explain to them there are people in the world who are discriminated against, but aren't black. They simply didn't know that was the case! And if that's the people who are moderating content... I said motherboard all the time in meetings and chats, ne…

One of the challenges with moderation teams like that or similar is that the folks who REALLY want to do that job .. are the folks who absolutely should NOT be doing it.

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#155
post #22

I've been privy to people trying to ban words like "whitelabel" at my company. Thankfully, management & executives at my company never stood for that BS so I still get to use whitelist & blacklist in documentation, and don't worry about those non-issues get in the way of me actually doing work. Google might be too far gone, and working with those people would be so exhausting that it's actually stopped me from applyi…

whitelist and blacklist are lazy language, even if you ignore the fact that you personally are not bothered by them and you don't have the mental capacity to understand why someone else might be. They carry no intrinsic meaning, and if you can't come up with more descriptive language you are the problem. In all cases you can come up with a better word - include, deny, allow, block, ban, accept, etc. It all depends on…

Your ableist bigotry against people with lower intellectual capacity has been noted.

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#156

Since when is black and white primarily a racial thing anyways? It seems a little inverted, like a black flag or a black mark on an account, it’s not like it’s called “negrolist”, black and white are colors before they are slang for race/culture. Maybe instead of neutering the dictionary we could try a different angle and quit lumping people into “white” or “black”? Some people are Kenyan, Irish, Nigerian, German, no…

I think they're trying to change language to disassociate "black" with negative meaning.

Which is going to be very hard, because the reason for the association is from black being the unknown. It's the night that hides the predators. It's the shadow where the enemy hides. It's where you don't want to put your foot in case there are spiders or a sharp rock.

Humans are afraid of the dark. I've not even heard of being afraid of the light.

Death and darkness.

I'd like a historian to confirm, but I'd be very surprised if this type of language didn't exist in most places, including before ever seeing a darker skinned person.

But this effort is doomed to fail. You can be afraid of the dark at night and that is not a predictor at all of racism. Indeed, do people with darker skin not get afraid of the dark?

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#157
post #9

In the article they use the example of "Motherboard" and "Landlord" and seem to suggest that these are areas where the Google AI is making mistakes or being overly strict. As a Google employee expressing my own opinion and observations of company culture, I can say that these are 100% not mistakes. Many Google employees are just so out of touch with the real world that they believe it is the duty of Google Docs to ch…

You have got to be kidding. Was this some retaliatory complaint by some dude showing dudes can be triggered by female-emphasizing phrases as well?

Should it have been renamed to birthing-person-board? What a joke

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#158
post #9

In the article they use the example of "Motherboard" and "Landlord" and seem to suggest that these are areas where the Google AI is making mistakes or being overly strict. As a Google employee expressing my own opinion and observations of company culture, I can say that these are 100% not mistakes. Many Google employees are just so out of touch with the real world that they believe it is the duty of Google Docs to ch…

Genuinely curious: what do you do internally for "male" and "female" connectors?

plug, socket

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On landlord I can’t think of a proper synonym. Property owner and proprietor are broader categories of what a landlord is. They don’t mean the person you’re paying rent to for your housing.

faucet-fixer?

I see you haven't interacted with many landlords.

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#160
post #36

I have been thinking about this for a while, and came to the conclusion that the main weakness of progressivism is its arrogance. A progressive simply thinks that she is more educated, virtuous or simply better than others. This manifests subtly, from "helping poor immigrants", to not so subtle implementations, like knowing better what Google queries you actually meant to type, to censoring "fake news", because peopl…

You are lumping all progressive people together. You also assume they are female. Why?

Aren't we supposed to use female pronouns when we're speaking generally now? It used to be male, but I know that's long gone.
Post reply on HN