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

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

#441

Post by lokar »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #416
slg wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what your age is in comparison to your chosen ideal of 2005. As I am getting older it is easier to see the patterns in all this. Most people just want the entire world frozen from the time they were young. That includes everything from the cast of SNL to acceptable language. I have seen enough decades of people complaining about policing language to know that we survived multiple waves of this before 2005 an…

I dunno, man. You're right that the term "mainboard" isn't going to kill us, and I wouldn't advise anyone to make this their main crusade in life. But that's a pretty high standard of dismissiveness and I've never seen anyone apply it to language changes that genuinely bug them. If we discovered that Google employees call codebases which have a lot of bugs "gay", and people got angry about it, would you tell them tha…

Be careful with the word crusade

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

#442

Post by uoaei »

nicbou wrote: post #376
yupper32 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but did you just say one of the reasons you left google was the memegen moderation team? I can't imagine that being a legitimate worry that would impact my employment decisions. It seems there's a group of people who are too far in the other direction too. When I heard that it's preferred to say "allowlist" instead of "whitelist", do you know what my reaction was? "Sure, whatever." And I moved on with my life.…

You're right. I use the new terms and move on. It's really not that bad. However it tends to become a password game. There's a new password every few months. If you know the new password, you get to feel above those who don't. It's as we invent new crimes to charge people with. If no one calls it out (because sure, whatever), it keeps ratcheting up. Then banal conversations turn into minefields. What you say gets inv…

> What you say gets invalidated because you used the wrong password.

This entire discourse is so full of straw men it's hard to believe you have actually had real conversations with these people.

There is so much effort during these conversations toward "calling in" vs "calling out" that I am very confused how a conversation could ever get to the point you describe. You'd have to be really callous, and completely unwilling to meet your conversation partner on an even field, to elicit such reactions.

And no, Twitter pile-ons don't count as evidence for your argument -- Twitter is very, very far from an accurate cross-section of "real life".

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

#443

Post by photochemsyn »

yupper32 wrote: post #335
dekhn wrote: 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…

Sorry but did you just say one of the reasons you left google was the memegen moderation team? I can't imagine that being a legitimate worry that would impact my employment decisions. It seems there's a group of people who are too far in the other direction too. When I heard that it's preferred to say "allowlist" instead of "whitelist", do you know what my reaction was? "Sure, whatever." And I moved on with my life.…

The terms 'guestlist' and 'shitlist' would perhaps be more accurate in terms of what those two forms of security access control are really about. Using a guestlist to control access is more secure (as you can background check everyone on the guestlist), but limits traffic; conversely allowing anyone in except those known troublemakers on the shitlist gets more traffic but means undesirables might slip in and become nuisances.

On the other hand, all that nonsense about 'master' was ridiculous. Master's degrees, the master boot record, come on let that one go.

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

#444

Post by akhmatova »

causalmodels wrote: post #438
akhmatova wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it is generally understood that the owner/proprietor of a bar is the business owner (aka license owner) -- and that this in general is not the same person who owns the bricks. A more clearcut case of semantic confusion I can see a crappy AI creating out of the blue would be: "My proprietor said if I didn't pay the rent soon she was gonna ..." Which clearly has a very different (and basically nonsensical) me…

Agreed, I was just trying give an example of why using proprietor would create confusion.

Right -- the "bar's landlord" is in general not it's proprietor.

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

#445

Post by throw10920 »

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.

> Terms like "motherboard" are readily findable on Google's internal search.

This is meaningless. I work at a large organization that has banned terms like "master/slave" and "whitelist/blacklist", and I can also readily find these terms through internal search, simply because it's taking a while for the requirements to be implemented and enforced.

> I could not find anything referencing a banned non-inclusive words policy in the employee policy guide.

This also doesn't mean a lot, unless you've comprehensively searched through every possible location for the relevant policy, as almost every organization in existence has terrible knowledge management.

Go talk directly to someone in HR and tell me if they tell you that those words aren't restricted.

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

#446

Post by [deleted] »

she46BiOmUerPVj wrote: post #218
brunooliv wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... essentially you have to go around hoops in the way you communicate internally? LEL.

Sure if you believe it. We also don't speak to each other to cater to people who are deaf, and we don't use sign language to cater to people who are blind.

[deleted]

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

#447

Post by dang »

luxuryballs wrote: post #97

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…

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123767.)

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

#448

Post by wardedVibe »

grishka wrote: post #345
duskwuff wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our society just doesn't have the concept of racism it seems because of the exceeding rarity of people who aren't European or Asian. "Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave," said Vorbis. "So I understand," said the Tyrant. "I imagine that fish have no word for water." -- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

Either way, people here aren't discriminated based on their race. Never were. This particular problem seems to be uniquely American because of their history. We do have a word for racism by the way. It's, unsurprisingly, "расизм".

Racism is a problem in large parts of Europe, and generally any country with a history involving enslaved Africans. I wouldn't be surprised if ethnic discrimination in Russia went a different direction though, since their colonization all happened in central Asia, where skin color isn't all that informative.

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

#449

Post by [deleted] »

nicbou wrote: post #407
vorpalhex wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being told I use too many adjectives, my word choice is too heavy for my audience or that I used too many clauses is useful. Being passive-aggressively told "blacklist" is a no-no word is not. If you were really clever, you'd let the user set a "sensitivity" level for the writing from "normal human speak" to "corporate PR approved".

It depends on who you write for. As a non-native, non-American speaker, I'd be happy to know if I'm accidentally offending the people I'm writing to.

[deleted]

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

#450

Post by TrevorJ »

tryptophan wrote: post #195
madamelic wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion: `main` is better. It's shorter, it's more descriptive, and costs nothing to remove something someone might find offensive. It's pretty much an all around win.

Its worse because suddenly 20 years worth of tutorials are slightly 'wrong' and will confuse new users even more for no reason. "Why does my git say main and not master? Did I break it?" "Why cant I push to master like the 100x tutorials show? I get errors!"

Chesterton's Offence: Before we change a word, we should first understand why it was there in the first place. :P
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