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Part of my code makes Copilot crash

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Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#51

Content filters on ML feel so silly. I assume the goal is to avoid bad press? Because the... "attack" would be someone generating offensive material, which they could just write themselves, not to mention I have serious doubts that any filter is going to be a serious barrier. For images/ video I can see merit, ex: using that nudity inference project on images of children, but text seems particularly pointless.

The point is because sometimes even a perfectly reasonable inference from an ML model would be considered a big mistake due to societal considerations that are unknown to the model.

For example, a couple years ago, there was a big hubbub over a Google Image labeler that labeled a black man and woman as "gorillas". A mistake for sure, but the headlines about the algorithm being "racist" were wrong. The algorithm was certainly incorrect, and it could probably have been argued that one reason it was wrong is that its training set contained fewer black people than white people, but the algorithm was certainly unaware of the historical context around this being a racist description.

Similarly, in the early days of Google driving directions I remember one commenter saying something along the lines of "You can tell that no black engineers work at Google" because it pronounced "Malcolm X Boulevard" as "Malcolm 10 Boulevard". Of course, the vast majority of time you see a lone "X" in a street address it is pronounced "ten".

It's kind of analogous to the "uncanny valley" problem in graphics. When the algorithm gets things mostly right, people think of it as "human-like", and so when it makes a mistake, people attribute human logic to it (it's quite safe to assume that a human labeling a picture of black people as gorillas is racist), as opposed to the plain statistical inferences ML models make.

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#52
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much more likely: the upvotes are because many people have frustration at this type of thing, and limited places to channel their frustration, so when they see a post like this, they upvote it to express their frustration. Or maybe that’s just me..

What type of thing? Asking for genuine curiosity.

This deserves a chance at getting a sincere answer, so I’ve upvoted it. I almost asked a similar question on another thread, but backed out. There seems to be a lot of inference going on in other comments about what any commenter finds frustrating or otherwise confounding, but I think it would be good for the discussion to eliminate some of that inference.

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#53

Can we get a source for that? Because at the moment, it's just a comment made by a person on the internet with nothing backing it up...

So, I tested this locally and for the first time, immediately after using a variable named “gender”, it stopped suggesting.

I wonder if this is to prevent it from accidentally processing PII or PHI data. Maybe someone else who didn’t get their account on some kind of cooldown can try it with “birthdate” or “DOB” or “SSN”. I highly doubt this has anything to do with gender being a controversial or blocked term for political reasons or something.

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#55
post #39

This thread needs a call to Rule 14: do not feed trolls. The bugs apparent trigger word is close to hot-button poli-sci issue. Can we please focus on the Technology.

> The bugs apparent trigger word is close to hot-button poli-sci issue. Can we please focus on the Technology.

I totally agree that this story has a high risk of flamewars.

But it definitely has heavy Technology component, too.

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#57
post #40

Can we get a source for that? Because at the moment, it's just a comment made by a person on the internet with nothing backing it up...

I added "gender" (an IANA registered JWT claim) to my JWT payload schema and found Copilot will not provide any suggestions after that. Not on the same line, nor in the rest of the file. After removing the word gender entirely, it works again. https://www.iana.org/assignments/jwt/jwt.xhtml

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Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#58
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much more likely: the upvotes are because many people have frustration at this type of thing, and limited places to channel their frustration, so when they see a post like this, they upvote it to express their frustration. Or maybe that’s just me..

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#59
What was that bot that MSFT stood up on Twitter that trolls and memers fed to turn alt-right? I know they eventually took it down and that it stirred up a lot of controversy.

I would not be surprised if someone found some Copilot output stemming from "gender" and reported to MSFT/GitHub for them to simply short circuit or "break" after finding certain keywords.

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