301–310 of 411 posts
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Ehm... Sorry to break it to you, but people who think they were born the wrong sex are increasingly treated with hormones before the onset of puberty (with puberty-delaying treatments it's kind of the point). Not arguing whether it's good or bad, but by definition they are children at that point in time.
Puberty blockers are hormone agonists. Not hormones.
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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.
The problem is that if you train an ML model with a bunch of data that happened to be available in the past, then the system will perpetuate the same biases as were inherent in the training data. This leads to the (real issue) Google image classifier categorizing an image of a black man as a "gorilla" etc. Certain words are heavily loaded and are worth just skipping to avoid all the hassle for now.
Gorilla and black just was the most politically charged one of the bunch.
(The other potentially politically charged one was some tendency to misclassify people of various levels of body fats as various animals.)
> Certain words are heavily loaded and are worth just skipping to avoid all the hassle for now.
If memory serves right, that was Google's pragmatic solution: if they detected a human in the picture, they 'manually' suppressed the animal classification.
So they lost being able to classify 'Bob and his dog' in return for not accidentally classifying a picture of just Alice as a picture of a seal.
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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
The anger is clearly not at the "soulless machine", but at the people and corporation that built, trained, and tend to it. The parent comment did not say "the community explodes with anger [at copilot]", they just said "with anger". You have made up a total strawman. It is like if someone said "If that person were stabbed with a knife, they would be angry", and you responded "Do people really get angry at emotionless…
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No, refusing to generate stuff in an area where the output is likely to be controversial (in either direction) is refusing to bat. It'll wait for a pitch that it thinks it can hit, just like it refuses to play for many other categories-- you'll have hard time to get Copilot to enumerate races, too. Ignoring the potential offensiveness and YOLOing through it is swinging the bat wildly at every pitch.
I think you might not fully grasp the scope of the issue here. Right now, if a file you're editing contains one of the restricted words, Copilot will refuse to make any suggestions at all in that file while that word is present -- even if the word isn't relevant to the part of the file you're editing. To keep to the baseball metaphor, Copilot is going on strike at the first whiff of controversy. What I'm suggesting i…
Yah-- it's unfortunate but it's easy. It might be OK to tolerate it if it's clearly outside the range of tokens used in suggestions, but the filtering doesn't use tokenized stuff.
> What I'm suggesting is that Copilot should keep working when these words are present, but refuse to attach any significance to the specific word. This could probably be implemented by replacing the problematic words with randomly generated strings before processing the text, then swapping those strings back afterwards.
The problem is, the trained model is much smarter than the keyword-based filtering. If you just whiteout the watchwords, it still has a pretty good chance of gleaning context and making a commentary on gender that Microsoft would rather not deal with.
> (It could be reasonable for Copilot to refuse to make suggestions at all if the output would contain truly offensive language, like unambiguous racial slurs or sexual terms. But "gender" clearly isn't that.)
Right now the list is quite a large variety of things. Mostly racial slurs and sexual terms. But letting an AI ramble on after "blacks" is kind of dangerous, as are various gender-related terms that do have innocuous interpretations. It's easy to put words in the filter list and much harder to try and use nuance on these topics that even humans struggle with nuance around.
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.…
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.
Yep, I noticed this last year when they still stored the list client-side and had great fun reverse engineering it: https://twitter.com/moyix/status/1433254293352730628
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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…
But it’s also about how you get there. If you only expose kids to pictures of white male doctors you’re going to give them a bias which will shape their lives and by extension the society around them. I think techno libertarian suggestions like these are dangerous because they assume there’s one “canonical” place to fix these issues and all other places can just reflect the status quo, without affecting it (which in…
Social problems are messy and full of situations like this where people can reasonably disagree and have decent, good-faith rationales for both sides, and we lack the kind of evidence that allows us to have strong confidence in our guesses about what would help.
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…
The last time Microsoft did that, they ended up with their bot posting racist content on twitter. They of all people understand that just following what people do on the internet is a recipe for disaster.
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.…