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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

#481

Post by kofejnik »

GordonS wrote: post #398
grishka wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

America certainly takes racism to extremes, but it's not a problem unique to the US - racism is a thing all over Europe and Asia too, to varying degrees. I've never been to Russia, but I'm finding it hard to believe racism doesn't exist there.

having lived in Russia, I assure you there's a lot of pretty open racism there, racist slurs are openly and widely used for anyone who's not a slav, and even some slavs now as well (e.g. Ukrainians)

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

#482

Post by ushakov »

DannyBee wrote: post #414
ushakov wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why does a company have a say which words are allowed to be used? i mean there are some bad words you shouldn’t use, but i just can’t grasp why is there something like “motherboard” on that list?

The banned words list they are referring to is about what words should be used in external product documentation and marketing :) Not about what you are allowed to say inside google, or anything like that.

the point still stands though

could you please explain to me, a non-native english speaker, why using "mainboard" is better than "motherboard"?

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

#484

Post by layer8 »

scythe wrote: post #301
timmg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who also works at Google, I agree that there is a vocal minority who want Google to be a promoter of progressive values, but: I think you nay be exaggerating things here. I've never even heard of any controversy over the word "motherboard". I just did some internal searches. It seems to be a well-used word, both in code and in documentation. (I did a code search for both "motherboard" and "mainboard" and t…

"Allowlist" and "denylist" are sonically awkward. Why not "inlist" and "outlist"?

That’d discriminate against the outgroup. Although I guess “denylist” would be offensive to deniers?

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

#485

Post by thegrimmest »

valeness wrote: post #281
tryptophan wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

Does this mean we should never make progress or change anything? Also if your tutorials are using a base repository to work from, then you can still have the branch "master" it's just not default. So your existing repos should still work. And if you changed your repo then you should be responsible for updating your documentation to reflect that. It's just good practice.

I fail to see how changing the names from "master" and "slave" makes any "progress" at all. What is the most concise way to express the idea that one entity is totally subordinate to another, and must comply with every request the other sends?

I struggle to come up with any two terms that make this more clear than "master" and "slave". Just because we've abolished chattel slavery, doesn't mean we should avoid the very words themselves when they are appropriate. Destruction of meaning is far worse than some abstract offense that doesn't seem reasonable to take on behalf of a computer process.

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

#486

Post by zefei »

I don't believe this has anything to do with AI, it most likely is rule based (not the entire system, just inclusive warnings). People like to shit on AI, but AI wouldn't really make such ridiculous suggestions, only human can.

The suggestions look a lot like code linters in FAANG companies. People from the outside will be shocked at some of these "inclusive" linters if they take a look.

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

#487

Post by nomel »

exyi wrote: post #350
riffraff wrote: post #76

The most hilarious thing about this is that Google has used "AI" to create the most un-inclusive tool of all, Google Translate. I present you the beautiful translation of hungarian gender-less sentences to english: ő csinos. ő okos. ő csúnya. ő jó. becomes she is pretty. he is clever. she is ugly. he is good. I can't wait for inclusive warnings to come to non-english languages.

While it's hilarious, it's understandable IMHO - just basic statistics, she is more often used in front of pretty/ugly. It's showing a glitch in our society more than a glitch in Google AI. This on the other hand looks like a hand-crafted blacklist of words that they want to remove from the language, I have no idea how would I train an AI which would classify "motherboard" as inappropriate.

> I have no idea how would I train an AI which would classify "motherboard" as inappropriate.

I believe you just need to give it emotions.

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

#488

Post by [deleted] »

twobitshifter wrote: post #48
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.

[deleted]

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

#489

Post by mpfundstein »

______-_-______ wrote: post #90
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…

"Motherboard" is particularly unbelievable. The motherboard runs the machine. It's a woman in a position of power. Isn't that what everyone says they want? Or is the idea to just erase the very concept of gender from the world? Welcome to OkCupid, I am a [PERSON] seeking [PERSON] I want out of this timeline

russia is our way out of this timeline

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

#490

Post by drdaeman »

grishka wrote: post #269
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…

> somebody had to explain to them there are people in the world who are discriminated against, but aren't black. As a Russian, this is amusing to read. For me and most people I know, when you meet a black person, it's totally normal to ask them "where are you from" because they can't possibly be local. Our society just doesn't have the concept of racism it seems because of the exceeding rarity of people who aren't Eu…

> Our society just doesn't have the concept of racism

I'd say "racism" those days is a fairly weird word that I've seen infrequently applied as an umbrella term covering many different things.

It's almost certainly true that there is virtually no "classical" (black vs white) racism there. Russia never had any significant fraction of black population, and the flavors of slavery were quite different from the US. When Russian sees a black person, while their inner voice would surely say "this person is an alien", there's most likely would be no immediate derogatory prejudice involved - because to best of my awareness it was never instilled, at least not in the Soviet and post-Soviet mindspace.

But in Russia there surely is something similar, just of a different flavor - again, because of different history and societal composition. Say, doubtlessly there are tons of prejudices based on ethnicity - just remember how many derogatory names and jokes are there (and always were) for neighboring nations such as Ukrainians (this is so fucked up!), Georgians, Tajiks or Uzbeks; or Russian ethniticies - especially Chechens (this nationality is pretty touchy conversation subject).

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