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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

#761
post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with “white” and everything to do with regressive left. Here is Kamala Harris, an Indian-Black American, pushing “Latinx”: https://mobile.twitter.com/kamalaharris/status/1290733001320...

You can’t overlook the role that white progressives play in selectively amplifying minority voices. I can’t get on CNN to give the “Bangladeshi guy take” on rising crime by saying stuff most Bangladeshi people agree with. I have to provide a Bangladeshi perspective that is appealing to the white progressives that make the decisions at CNN. There’s a deep synergy here that exploits the fact that most Americans have li…

Desi here, like Tulsi more than Kamala. I'd say Kamala is more disliked than the average white person too, because she panders so incompetently. I have not heard great things about Pramila Jayapal either.

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

#762
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the natural outcome of far leftist ideologies. People need to wake up and start rejecting this destructive ideology where a person is evaluated only based on their identity. I think MLK had something to say about that.

I don't think it is. It is more of a natural outcome of silly corporatists not really understanding why leftists and progressives object to things, and so just reflexively avoiding anything that could be, however tenuously, linked to gender. They are concern trolling themselves.

It’s bubbling up from cloistered academia. Not corporations. Corporations do the bare minimum to get the annoying people to shut up

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

#763
post #409
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I’m pessimistic about the West winning the second cold war. While Chinese engineers are working hard on world dominating AI models and other hard tech, Western engineers are wasting man hours on crap like this.

>wasting man hours People hours

Lost it

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

#764
The good news is that those who are against this stuff may be pleased to know you're not alone --- roughly half of the Americans on one side of the political spectrum would agree with you.

The bad news is that Google and seemingly the rest of Big Tech are all sitting solidly on one side, and amongst all this "diversity and inclusion" talk, there is basically no thought given about diversity and inclusion of the political kind. Given the power that Google has over "speech", perhaps some sort of equality of political representation "affirmative action" needs to happen to it too?

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

#765
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…

I am incredulous at the "mother" to "birthing person" requirement. I have seen one or two people with such prescriptive views on language but the vast majority of people I know consider it ridiculous. And I am in an incredibly "woke" social bubble.

I thought that was a joke when I heard about it first from my wife. Sorry I mean non-gendered marital creature

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

#766

So much of this technology perpetuates the biases they're intended to fix. We put some of our job postings through one of these, and it flagged too many 'masculine' words, like 'analyze', 'leadership', and 'data'. Sorry women, time get back in the kitchen and nurture.

Got a source for that? Or an/the online tool you used? I'd love to try it

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

#767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This explanation rings a lot more true to me than the rest of this thread. Everyone here seems to be looking into shadows for the woke gestapo, when I'd be willing to bet that this explanation is a lot closer to how this tool actually came to exist. I appreciate you adding to the conversation.

It's a little of both. There's enough woke influence over corporate communication to drive all employees to want to avoid non-inclusive words in docs. At that point, this becomes useful even for employees who don't agree with it—I'd rather just have the word flagged now and fix it instead of going back and forth later. However, the net result is that words are driven out of the language even if everyone involved in t…

It's also simply --

You're at Google. You need to do some kind of project that can be called a success -- within one quarter. What do you do?

One possibility, the disastrous effects of which we've seen, is to build Yet Another Incompatible Chat App.

This is another possibility. A very safe one, in a way.

You constantly have to demonstrate that you are "useful, self-directed, and doing important things", in an environment where usefulness and importance are extremely hard to judge, and so become very socially-constructed. It can get pretty brutal -- even if, when you step back and take the long view, it all seems ridiculous.

So when you look at what comes out of these companies, it's useful to remember that. Imagine the horrible games in which their employees have found themselves trapped.

(Money's a hell of a thing. Shame you seem to need so much of it.)

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

#768
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the natural outcome of far leftist ideologies. People need to wake up and start rejecting this destructive ideology where a person is evaluated only based on their identity. I think MLK had something to say about that.

MLK explicitly supported affirmative action and other programs designed explicitly to benefit black people in order to make up for past discrimination. I suspect he would be tired of being used as a justification for absolute colorblindness.

There's a long-running joke about MLK giving exactly one speech and never saying anything else.

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

#769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of other companies that have the other side of the coin in values though that would admire people who stand up. It's very nice to be a good culture fit at a company. I have a Blue Lives Matter flag in the corner of my camera during interviews and it's gotten me some really good offers and I havn't been declined once. On the flip side, I know many that have been discriminated based on their looks or voc…

I actually would prefer that most political stuff stay out of the workplace. So minimize the crosses, the blue lives matter flags, the other stuff. In many of the more frugal businesses I've seen, folks just don't have the time to strike / protest etc for some of the stuff the FANG folks are into.

This

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

#770
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…

Silly question: ignoring any kind of history, why fight for terms like "whitelist" and "blacklist" when terms like "allowlist" and "blocklist" are objectively clearer, especially for folks who's first language is not English?

Because they're established terms, and the witchhunt goes so far as to break builds and cause needless work just for the sake of political correctness: https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree/issues/2360

Political correctness linters require you to explicitly acknowledge or disable warnings when you're doing things like pasting existing URLs.

And it never stops with one term. It started with master/slave (which are now replaced with dozens of synonyms that are often hard to figure out), then whitelist/blacklist, and the activists are already queueing up the next words for sure.

Few people want to ban others from using alternative terms that they consider better, but where they draw the line is when others prevent them from using the terms they deem appropriate, or demand/force additional work.

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