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

vice.com

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

#41

Post by itsyaboi »

cynicalkane wrote: post #21
mgraczyk wrote: 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…

This entire comment is a lie. Terms like "motherboard" are readily findable on Google's internal search. I could not find anything referencing a banned non-inclusive words policy in the employee policy guide. I have never heard of anything remotely resembling someone catching heat for saying "motherboard" or whatever. Source: I also work at Google.

Since you work at Google, maybe you can answer this: does internal tooling exist to flag occurrences of "bad" words in say, code reviews or shared documents?

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

#42

Post by olalonde »

mgraczyk wrote: 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…

Reminds me of when GitHub stopped using "master" for the default branch because it was somehow offensive.

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

#44

Post by andrewmutz »

Kylekramer wrote: post #18

This is an article nearly entirely built around a viral Tweet regarding "landlord" cause Vice writers live in a strange world where that is essentially a slur they want to use, and then found two edge cases to make it an "article".

Why would "landlord" be considered a slur?

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

#45

Post by zbrozek »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #14
john_moscow wrote: post #6

Well, such things are always driven by demand. And unfortunately, there is a strong demand in our society for policing words, renaming formulas and issuing apologies all while: * Property ownership is becoming out of question for an increasing fraction of Americans * Any kid of retirement (as in not having to work and enjoying life off your savings) has become a pipe dream * Having a single-income family with one par…

May I ask what the items in your enumerated list have to do with “policing words?”

He's pointing out that focusing on issues that don't have real impact is starving us of our ability to focus on broader, more serious issues. The shrinking of the middle class is a tangible problem. Words being insufficiently inclusive is not.

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

#46

Post by bombcar »

gdulli wrote: post #29

I spent many years in the bluest corner of a very blue state. But still I can't imagine any objection to the word "landlord" outside of (1) a right wing attempt to satirize the left, (2) a Google product brainstorming meeting, or (3) a rare sincere outlier or concern troll. In any of those cases I don't think this is necessary. That said, if the word "landlord" organically fell out of favor and out of usage to be rep…

Landlord gets hit from multiple sides; those who don't like that it contains "lord" which is a male term, those who don't like that landlords exist, and those who don't like that the concept of owning land exists.

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

#47

Post by dekhn »

karaterobot wrote: post #20

I dislike this proposed feature as much as the next person, but it's worth noting that the main complaint of this article is fairly unique: they work on a channel called Motherboard, and this feature is going to cause the name of their channel to be considered a problem. Most people won't experience that specific error case. It's valid, and points to the kinds of unforeseen consequences you run into when trying to ma…

and as we can see, large numbers of people- there are hundreds of us- think that the name of that channel to be highly offensive. Actually, no, wait, nobody actually finds it offensive.

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

#48

Post by twobitshifter »

mgraczyk wrote: 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…

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.

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

#49

Post by ayende »

nostromo wrote: post #31

Who was asking for Woke Clippy? Is Google just bored and completely out of ideas? They seem increasingly disconnected with what their users actually want.

I don't think I ever heard such an appropriate turn of phrase as "woke clippy", bravo!

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

#50

Post by darepublic »

kache_ wrote: 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…

Airbnb did a similar thing, var/schema name whitelabel was excised. Weirdly black label remained. It caused a frontend bug temporarily
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