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Part of my code makes Copilot crash

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Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#261

Post by bergenty »

captainmuon wrote: post #252
fny wrote: post #122

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.…

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 wi…

It’s really not some complicated multiverse of possibilities. It’s biological, very factual and the underlying genetic basis is as objective as something can get.

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#262

Post by xupybd »

woojoo666 wrote: post #234
philipswood wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Choosing door 3 unfortunately leads to ... 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.

Unfortunately the people that care (like HN people) are less likely to spend time organizing protests and riling up an internet mob

I'd argue it's fortunate. While it does seem like a good idea to get out there and promote your sides view of thing, I suspect the best option is to excel in your life and rise to influence.

My hope is that the people here, at least the level headed ones, will rise to positions of influence and not the people rioting at every chance.

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#263

Post by xupybd »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #87

Aren't we missing the forest for the trees here? 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.

I think they have no choice. If you don't do that the vandals will destroy any AI that learns from the public.

For example https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#264

Post by throwaway290 »

pseudalopex wrote: post #230
lmm wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I never had a reason to call people ugly behind their backs. Calling Romani Romani not a word they don't like isn't dishonest, strange, or rude. I don't know anything about the birth genitals of most people I dine with.

Regarding calling Romani Romani, this can be a touchy subject, just as a heads-up. For years being asked where I'm from or being referred to as Russian, even without me present (e.g., I overheard or inferred people discussed this), made me uncomfortable. It's fading recently only because of the war and the overt hatred directed at me by nationality online making me more confrontational about it.

I observe this happening with some people of other nationalities too, depending on individual personality. (It doesn't tend to happen with people from 'global north', of course, who tend to lack any confidence issues on this front.)

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#265

Post by MengerSponge »

tom_ wrote: post #120
nomilk wrote: post #16

> Copilot crash because the word “gender” A metaphor for our times.

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 ev…

Only 18? Child's play. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/why-this-fungu...

Interestingly, I don't know of any zoological cases that would require more than a short int to enumerate.

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#266

Post by mlyle »

captainmuon wrote: post #255
mlyle wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They refer to it as “eliminating bias”, I don't think, e.g. being able to handle black faces correctly is some sort of massive ideological commitment. So let's not pretend that the entire concern of bias in AI is irrelevant, no matter where you stand on gender. > conformance with one very specific set of ideological commitments You know-- let's just talk about basic respect and dignity: if someone strongly wants to…

Detecting black faces correctly is one thing; obviously if a system can't do that it's an issue and it shows that the people making the system were biased. But something like Copilot or DALL-E? If you ask DALL-E for a doctor and it rarely shows black people (or women), then it is neither racist nor broken. Our society is broken. There are not enough people in that job that are not white and male. Or they are not repr…

> There are not enough people in that job that are not white and male.

Have you looked at the actual demographics of medical doctors in the US? 54% are women, and 35% are nonwhite. But when we have media depictions of doctors, I agree they tend to be white and male.

So, what should DALL-E conform to? Should it conform to A) our actual present society, B) the biased original dataset (which leans both towards the past and towards existing media biases), or C) some idealized version of society?

I got 12 white dudes, one Southeast Asian woman, one Southeast Asian looking man, and two men that I'm not sure of their race when I tried this just now (quite possibly white). This is despite OpenAI's efforts to debias it, and isn't representative of current physician demographics.

But if AI just represents and reinforces extant biases-- and worse, AI is used to produce art and text that ends up in other AIs training sets -- how do we ever get out of this mess? The people who produce, publish, and productize AI do have some degree of editorial responsibility.

> But it turns out there is no "morally neutral".

Of course not. Hume pointed out long ago that you can't transform positive statements into normative ones.

But all of this is a little offtopic, anyways. This is about when it's reasonable to refuse to return a result. "Hey, your answer had the N-word in it, and we know most of the time our model does that it's offensive-- so we're just not going to return a result, sorry." I think this is a reasonable path to take when you know that your model has some behaviors that are socially questionable.

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#267

Post by duskwuff »

kodah wrote: post #155
fny wrote: post #122

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.…

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…

Making Copilot stop in its tracks when it sees the word "gender" and refuse to continue until the word is removed is still making a statement. Refusing to bat would be treating "gender" as a meaningless token, just as if you'd typed "traqre" instead.

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#268

Post by winReInstall »

eric4smith wrote: post #64

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 ad…

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.

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#269

Post by duskwuff »

jan_Inkepa wrote: post #7

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.

As a result of another word on the Naughty List, you may run into similar issues while writing multithreaded code.

(The word in question is "race" -- as seen in the phrase "race condition".)

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#270

Post by spoils19 »

bergenty wrote: post #261
captainmuon wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

It’s really not some complicated multiverse of possibilities. It’s biological, very factual and the underlying genetic basis is as objective as something can get.

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