Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about a motherboard is specifically maternal?
Better question, are PCBs viviparous or oviparous?
Viaparous, obviously.
Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken
701–710 of 1001 posts
Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken
#702I know "it's literally 1984" [1] is a meme but c'mon... This is ridiculous even for Google. The systematic deconstruction and sanitation of language so that it conforms to a particular group's ideological leanings is unacceptable, especially in the hand's of a mega corporation.
Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken
#703In 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…
I can't imagine most employees agree with this. Why aren't they pushing back?
Because the amount of effort required to fight people who are passionate about an ideology when you don't particularly care is far greater than just going along and changing a few words. Sure this can result in catastrophic outcomes sometimes (e.g. Nazism) but most people just want to get their paychecks and go home or do whatever job they have without going into politics.
Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken
#704In 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…
Woke Clippy (to borrow from up-thread) is going to have a field day when it learns German. There. Are. So. Many. Violations.
A brilliant term, and it brings me back to what annoys me the most about all of this: Clippy was shite and got in the way of productivity, and now I'm going to have another "helper" in a tool that I use every day, and it is going to get in my way without even achieving its apparent goals because this stuff just does not work.
To push the Clippy thing further, Bill Gates once gave us "content is king". Google's Woke Clippy needs to learn that "context is king" - but it can't ever do that with language; well, not without a general AI.
Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken
#705Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about when the landlord is a company? Or an actual man in fact? We're going from unnecessarily gendered to unnecessarily neutered word.
Like most things, it depends on the situation. The point is to find something that does work. Surely there’s room for improvement?
> Surely there’s room for improvement?
A significant number of people, perhaps even a heavy majority, think there's nothing wrong with "landlord" that needs improvement. Change for change's sake isn't a great justification.
Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken
#706Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually I've seen an English linter to help you maintain a passive voice for papers, remove waffle words and unnecessary fluff, etc. I'm not sure I can find the exact one I'm thinking of, but wasn't too bad overall, it spotted errors and made helpful suggestions. It was cool too, because it would read from stdin and integrated into vim pretty well with a few lines in my config.
Why would you want to maintain a passive voice? That's terrible writing unless you are defendant in litigation.
I think it was made for publishing scientific research, and you could flag the options for what you wanted checked. If you were okay without the passive voice hints, you could still make whatever you were writing very direct and concise, or less wishy washy.
Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken
#707The 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.
> 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.
Well, this doesn't necessarily show you facts about society because there's no particular reason to think the training set distribution is the same as anything in the real world.
Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken
#708Earlier quoted context omitted.
> costs nothing to remove something someone might find offensive But there is a cost. You're losing a battle in the war of free speech vs Orwellian thought control. The woke (an offshoot of last-wave feminism, currently promoted mainly by the control-left strain of the Democratic party) are lying; they're not actually offended, they're just using that as an excuse (propaganda) and as an emotional appeal, to get you t…
I don't think Latinx is a good example. The GP mentions there's no functional cost to `main`, and this is true. Latinx has a functional cost in that the Spanish language literally does not support the phonetics of Latinx. That phrase is going to die soon and it never picked up in Latin America. Most likely the queer community in Latin America will come up with more effective slang. It took the US queer community deca…
"Latinx" isn't meant as a counterexample to "master/main", it's meant to demonstrate that the woke don't care about preventing offence, but instead about power, even if it means enforcing non-sensical policies; the fact that Spanish has no "x" further reinforces my point.
Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken
#709We've gotten to the point where we think that not one person should be even mildly bothered by what we say.
Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken
#710> Emily Lipstein typed “Motherboard” (as in, the name of this website) into a document and Google popped up to tell her she was being insensitive: “Inclusive warning. Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers. Consider using different words.” It’s amazing how a Fortune 500 company can release a product that chastises you for using the word “motherboard” because it has “mother” in it, while other people…
"Parentboard". But yes, anytime you hear "AI-powered" and "Natural language parsing", these kinds of cases are inevitable. I know google prides itself on technology, but there are some things like language that are moving so fast, with so many states that an initiative like this takes actual humans to debug. But given Youtube, it seems like Google is still stuck in the thought that they can automate everything.
Orphaned people would like a word with you about your harmful language.