8 ms·

Fearful of bias, Google blocks gender-based pronouns from new AI tool

58 points by eplanit 8y ago

adamnemecek 8y ago
It’s getting too much...this whole ideology will self implode.
bitcharmer 8y ago
When will this madness end? There will always be people offended by something. I'm pretty sure there are individuals claiming that NOT suggesting their pronoun deprives them of their identity, dignity or whatever. This is getting ridiculous.
- danharaj 8y ago
  > There will always be people offended by something. That does not mean every instance of offense should be ignored or dismissed, does it? How about addressing specific grievances instead of this extremely vague proclamation?
  - umvi 8y ago
    How do you determine if the grievance is valid or not? Sometimes "addressing specific grievances" should be to recommend the greivers apply for therapy. There are people up in arms about Maryland's flag because the checkered pattern is a confederacy symbol which somehow triggers them. The best course of action for those people is not to change the Maryland flag but rather to get them therapy so they can learn how to live without getting offended.
    - danharaj 8y ago
      > How do you determine if the grievance is valid or not? I can't give you an algorithm in advance that will let you decide every political and social issue ever. That's obviously not possible. There are heuristics, like. You can put yourself in the other person's shoes, try to empathize with them to figure out where they're coming from, and work out what their values and their reasoning is. You're a human being, a social creature whose most distinctive characteristic is extremely complex and nuanced communication. Your brain was made for this. > There are people up in arms about Maryland's flag because the checkered pattern is a confederacy symbol which somehow triggers them. The best course of action for those people is not to change the Maryland flag but rather to get them therapy so they can learn how to live without getting offended. I'm gonna let you in on a secret. If you treat everyone with contempt and dismissal, then every conclusion you come to about them will be contemptful dismissal.
    - elliekelly 8y ago
      >Sometimes "addressing specific grievances" should be to recommend the greivers apply for therapy. People often assume I'm a man on reddit. A lot of the time I'll politely let them know that not everyone on reddit is a man. Are you suggesting that I ought to go to therapy instead?
      - umvi 8y ago
        If you became offended that someone assumed you were a man, then yes, I would recommend therapy. Politely correcting them? Of course not, that's a completely reasonable thing to do. Consistently taking offense where none was intended warrants therapy in my book.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - Double_a_92 8y ago
        If you became offended that someone assumed you were a man, then yes, I would recommend therapy. Politely correcting them? Of course not, that's a completely reasonable thing to do. Consistently taking offense where none was intended warrants therapy in my book.
- Quarrelsome 8y ago
  The madness is gendered words to be buried so deeply in our psyche in the first place. There's limited need for those assumptions but due to history we let them rise to the top. Its perfectly straight forward to write evocative and passionate prose without concreting to a gender. It makes sense that when we build general purpose tools we encourage them to choose the neutral words more readily because it increases their accuracy without any loss of meaning. Are you really so terrified of a world where "meeting him" is "meeting them"?
- Robelius 8y ago
  >There will always be people offended by something. Trying to remove bias from a system is about trying to remove bias from a system. People tend to agree that removing bias from a system rather than intentionally creating a system that discriminates.
  - vorticalbox 8y ago
    that's how a lot of these AI work you weight bias' to more towards the result you want.
- Double_a_92 8y ago
  @Quarrelsome: "Them" wouldn't work here, because it's one specific person which has a concrete gender. 99% of people would assume that the investor is some company with multiple people if you say "them".
  - slothtrop 8y ago
    "You" and "They" is proper usage, it has been well before this whole dialog came into play. It's a catch-all. There's nothing about a made-up pronoun that captures an ambiguity about an individual, let alone their individuality. They have to express that themselves. Pronouns are not what jeopardizes or validates individuality.
    - Double_a_92 8y ago
      I agree on "they" but not "theM". Also I would only use "they" when talking about some generic person that really doesn't have a specific gender (or any other specific characteristics). If I'm writing an email about my investor I know who that is and what gender they are. Getting "them" as completion option is almost never what I would wan't in that case. (Above I even used "they" subconsciously, because It was just an example and I don't actually have an investor to talk about here.)
- bicubic 8y ago
  Tech industry in 2018: ML driven automation widening wealth disparity? Eh. ML ushering in the age of the persistent surveillance state? Eh. ML being used to manipulate elections and hijack democracies? Eh. ML might auto-suggest wrong gender in a text editor? STOP. EVERYTHING. THE RISK IS TOO HIGH IT MIGHT OFFEND SOME USERS.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    The connecting thread through all of them but the last is that there is some cost or difficulty to doing something about them, whereas the last is just a ticket in the bugtracker. Wouldn't it be nice for Google if all the activism in the world was directed towards things that could be solved at no cost by a junior engineer?
  - scottlocklin 8y ago
    This encapsulates the modern technocratic 'left' as much as anything.
- pasabagi 8y ago
  I think the problem is orthogonal to what you're upset about: 1. People expect public organizations to not be bigoted. 2. People are generally fairly bigoted. Therefore, if you're an organization training NNs on data produced by 2, you have to do some editing, or you're going to get in trouble over 1.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > I'm pretty sure there are individuals claiming that NOT suggesting their pronoun deprives them of their identity, dignity or whatever. This would be similar to how feminist movements in languages that systematically distinguish men from women push to get the language changed so that women are referred to as men ("there shouldn't be any difference between a waiter and a waitress"), while feminist movements in languages that don't draw the distinction push to get the language changed so that women are referred to explicitly as women ("we should acknowledge that women can be waiters too"). If feminism demands one of these things, it surely can't also demand the other.
  - woah 8y ago
    What are you talking about?
  - VikingCoder 8y ago
    ...OR.... Different groups of people call themselves "feminists," and don't agree with each other about changes they'd like to see in the world. It's kind of odd to me that people (like you apparently) don't understand.
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      What is it that you think I don't understand? I think they all agree that they'd like other people to change as an acknowledgement of their power. I also think that they can't both use the same justification to argue for opposite changes. What did I miss?
      - VikingCoder 8y ago
        "they" is not a homogeneous group. "they" are different groups that might use the same label. They can absolutely use the same justification, to argue for opposite changes. Their justification could be as simple as, "We want to be respected," and different groups of feminists disagree with each other about how best to achieve that goal. Sure, it's even worse if you personally land in the crosshairs, but from your example it sounds like the feminists are working in different places with different languages. And perhaps the problem of gaining respect requires different solutions in different areas.
- SolaceQuantum 8y ago
  I don't believe this is a move based off of the sensitivity at Google's workplace, especially given what we know now of Google's policies around workplace harassment. I would hesitate to extend it to Google's culture as a whole, or any political movement that is being partaken in here.
- lukev 8y ago
  > There will always be people offended by something Including, apparently, the fact that some people are making an effort to care about other people.
  - bgfmarks 8y ago
    And making a lot of money in the process of "caring". The majority of people who "care" would have no cushy job otherwise. This applies to programmers implementing useless features, social scientists, politicians, administrators and many more.
    - lukev 8y ago
      If you think people who are working to improve the social climate in which we find ourselves are in it for the money, I can only conclude you don't know any of them.
      - throwaway8879 8y ago
        I hate to break it to you, but a lot of that caring is also based on a profit motive. Some of it isn't, but some of it certainly is.
  - hueving 8y ago
    Right, and politicians are only in it to represent the people. /s
- _pmf_ 8y ago
  Oh, they're only getting started. As with the recent Twitter ToS changes, you'll be committing violations of concepts that you have never heard of.
- schalab 8y ago
  Its a game of diminishing returns. Assume there are 80% included in a game and 20% frozen out. Here it makes sense to change the rules of the game to include the other 20%. Yes it might slightly inconvenience the 80% but the switch from not being included at all to playing the game for the 20% is huge. So, overall it might be a net positive. Problem is when you get to a 98/2 split. Is it worth it to inconvenience such a large majority for the benefit of a very small minority. And how much are you going to change the rules? Is it worth the reduced enjoyment/efficiency of the game? At some point the trade off will become too much, and even moral/emotional arguments will not be enough to silence the dissent.
  - 2a0c40 8y ago
    relevant: Taleb's minority rule. cf. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
  - pjc50 8y ago
    In this case it's more like a 50/50 split.
  - mobjack 8y ago
    Is it really that big of an inconvenience if they don't include gender pronouns in automated email responses? How much revenue would Google be losing over such a decision? Even if something only affects 2% of the population, the cost of getting it wrong may not be worth the benefits.
- jackhack 8y ago
  It will end with the boot of the state stamping of the face of Winston Smith, and Winston expressing his love for Big Brother. Newspeak. When I first read 1984 I thought it so farfetched as to be laughable. I'm not laughing any more.
- xbryanx 8y ago
  Asking people to refer to you how you want to be addressed is not madness, it's just considerate.
  - voyager2 8y ago
    Asking people to refer to you how you want to be addressed IS madness. You must then ask every person how to refer to him/her/them/it/cis/trans/pan before you assume standard English is good enough.
    - xbryanx 8y ago
      Your madness is my ideal. I really enjoy living in a time that recognizes more than a binary sense of gender identity. Our language should change to address this. Just like it has changed to recognize that we use computers now.
      - voyager2 8y ago
        Please do not refer to madness as "your." "This" would be preferable. Also, I do not recognize that "our" language should change to address a tiny minority wishing to be referred to in a non-binary sense. The analog between using computers and non-binary self-identification is a strawman/woman/person/thing. Which straw<something> will be acceptable?
  - wang_li 8y ago
    Being offended when an algorithm picks one of two words that represent 99.9+% of the population is madness. Also the words in question are not used to address a person. When I am speaking to a person, regardless of their gender identity, I use the second person pronouns you, yours, or yourself. These are already gender neutral. The requested gender neutral pronouns (xir/xe/ne/???) are used in the third person and lower the value of communication as there is no asexual physical presentation, people present as men or women based on their fashion and physical characteristics. Going to a restaurant and saying to the attendant that you are here to me "that xir over there" does not help them figure out which table to take you to. Not to mention that people who feel gender neutral are still male or female (or have experienced a physical developmental disorder, humans are dimorphic after all.)
- pjc50 8y ago
  I have a feeling that if it always suggested "her" instead of always suggesting "him" there would be as much outrage, but from a different quarter.
- jahewson 8y ago
  Dear Mrs. bitcharmer, Guessing something with a 50% probability of being wrong is not a useful feature.
  - bitcharmer 8y ago
    I think it's better than 50%. Besides, how could I be offended at that? I actually think Mrs bitcharmer sounded funny.
- Mikeb85 8y ago
  I'd rather simply eliminate gender specific pronouns than invent a bunch of new, ridiculous ones. > I'm pretty sure there are individuals claiming that NOT suggesting their pronoun deprives them of their identity, dignity or whatever. Yeah but the end result of everyone wanting to feel special is that in the end, no one will.
  - asdkljh 8y ago
    Where would it end, if we just kept inventing pronouns? Everyone getting their own pronoun? Like, perhaps a unique name? In the end, there'd just not be any pronouns. Problem is, pronouns are useful. They compress text. One time I wrote a paper in high school where I didn't use any pronouns and always referred to Abraham Lincoln as "Abraham Lincoln", just so I could pad the paper as much as possible with the full length of Abraham Lincoln's name. "Abraham Lincoln, in Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address, suggested that Abraham Lincoln could..."
glenrivard 8y ago
That is going to further upset the right wing.
hadrien01 8y ago
> Google’s technology will not suggest gender-based pronouns because the risk is too high that its “Smart Compose” technology might predict someone’s sex or gender identity incorrectly and offend users Nobody cares when touch keyboards predict the wrong pronouns, so why would the same service in an email client be any different?
- atom-morgan 8y ago
  I can find you some people.
- bluetidepro 8y ago
  I agree. It seems a bit hyper sensitive to me. Esp when it's a machine that's predicting it, and not a human.
  - levesque 8y ago
    Bias is one of the new hot topics in ML. People act surprised that a face recognition software trained on a database of white people is unable to properly classify pictures of people from all around the world. The algorithm is only learning the data it was fed.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  Touch keyboards are (mostly) reliant on the user's history, so they offer a ready made "it's your own damn habits" defense that's less accessible for Google. A larger issue is that touch keyboards predict using single words and pretty quickly spiral into Markov chain incoherence if you let them draft whole messages. Smart Compose tries to offer syntactic and even semantic understanding. If I type "The investor is here, do you want to meet", my phone keyboard is working off 'meet', and will probably suggest 'up'. Smart Compose is working off 'investor' also, and apparently arrived at 'him'. (It's not clear to me from the article if this was actually tracked to specific biases, or if the predictions just adopted the default masculine.) But most of all, I'm guessing Google's core motivation is explained by the offhand comment that Smart Reply uses the same logic. A gendered pronoun suggestion probably isn't going to spark a scandal, but a feature that encourages you to send Google-drafted text unedited might be subject to a lot more scrutiny.
Double_a_92 8y ago
> Gender is a “a big, big thing” to get wrong. No it's not. Edit: Why is my personal opinion flagged? Am I really such a terrible person for thinking that way? We are so tolerant, but yet people can't have different opinions?
- CzechTech 8y ago
  It is in Silicon Valley.
- dang 8y ago
  Unsubstantive comments aren't good here, and on divisive topics are unwelcome. So the downvotes and flags were correct by local standards. On HN the idea is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html p.s. Flamewar comments, like you posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18541549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18541549 and elsewhere, will get your account banned on HN, so please don't do that.
  - Double_a_92 8y ago
    The substantial point was that I do not think that gender is just an important thing to be so worried about. Googles fear of gender bias is just not reasonable, at least not in that case. Why can I not express that feeling in a short comment? Would it have been better or any clearer if I wrote a "substantial" paragraph about it? I got the feeling that "formality" is more of an excuse to remove non-echo voices from here. Almost like in a political subreddit...
walterbell 8y ago
Which pronoun(s) will be used by Google AI to address future AI tools and robots? https://www.wired.com/story/robot-gender-stereotypes/ https://www.wired.com/story/robot-gender-stereotypes/ > Robots don’t have genders—they’re metal and plastic and silicon, and filled with ones and zeroes ... The problem is that even if a robot isn’t gendered, and even if it doesn’t look human or even animal, you’ll tend to want to gender it.
johnalamosisi 8y ago
LOL
jakelazaroff 8y ago
Alternate wording: "Google's Gmail autocomplete no longer assumes gender." From the article: > Gmail product manager Paul Lambert said a company research scientist discovered the problem in January when he typed “I am meeting an investor next week,” and Smart Compose suggested a possible follow-up question: “Do you want to meet him?” instead of “her.” So really, this is a fairly reasonable decision whereby it doesn't infer gender from signals such as profession. The article doesn't address this, but I wonder what it would do given an explicit gender, e.g. "She's the investor I am meeting next week."
- brobdingnagians 8y ago
  True, doing antecedent linking would be neat. I think that would be a good solution in order to get highest 100% accuracy. Although, if it linked the antecedent incorrectly, it could still put them in controversy.
  - jakelazaroff 8y ago
    Yeah, this is a hard problem and they probably still have mistakes in front of them. Still, though, I think "we misidentified the antecedent in this sentence" is easier to forgive than "we incorrectly assumed a gender based on profession". The former is just a grammar parsing bug, while the latter carries a lot of cultural baggage.
- hueving 8y ago
  So what does it follow up with? English doesn't have a non-gendered way to say "Do you want to meet him/her?" Is the idea just to eliminate all useful suggestions that contain genders?
  - mitchty 8y ago
    Singular they works and has been used since the 1300's. Say do you want to meet them? would work fine in this case.
    - 8y ago
topynate 8y ago
When's the Hebrew language version coming out? There are many languages for which this "solution" is completely impracticable. On the other hand, there should be no problem with Turkish or Persian.
- mc32 8y ago
  They’ll have a fun time with Korean where depending on speaker and audience different word declensions are used.
- gizmo686 8y ago
  English is probably one of the harder languages to get gender right in, since only pronouns are gendered. In more gendered languages, the problem is easier, since the AI could just look at nearby words to make a guess. In those languages, when it gets it wrong, people would likely assume that it just picked the wrong referent, instead of assuming gender.
skrowl 8y ago
Great, now Skynet is going to believe there are 38,000 genders when it goes online.
chickenfries 8y ago
This is fine. Guessing gender based on things like name is terribly error prone. Imagine if you have a name like Taylor. But I’m sure everyone who wants to be annoyed by this will find a way to be annoyed.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  Now that you point it out, I'd imagine that aside from any bias pronoun choice would also be one of the least accurate suggestions offered. When somebody writes "my cousin is in town, do you want to meet", it's basically impossible to do better than a coinflip chance - and that's if offering a pronoun next was even correct. So it's no real surprise that they didn't spend a bunch of effort on debiasing a feature that would still be wrong if they succeed.
SolaceQuantum 8y ago
I'd like to point out how long-hanging fruit this is for Google to address gender imbalance and gender inequality, especially given Google's much larger issues with their policies around inappropriate sexual behavior. You'd think more significantly, Google could work on establishing better policies and a more equal workplace culture.
thwoawayyowser 8y ago
Wait... So because the real world data doesn't align to our ideology, we're going tell it to ignore the facts
- DogPawHat 8y ago
  And what exactly is the real world data actually saying and how does it disprove Google's "ideology"?
  - MockObject 8y ago
    It's saying that word X is usually associated with "her", and Y with "him". Often, reality has a sexist bias.
brobdingnagians 8y ago
> Men have long dominated fields such as finance and science, for example, so the technology would conclude from the data that an investor or engineer is “he” or “him.” Err, so the AI correctly predicts that statistically you probably intend "him", but we limit the utility of the tool because that would be discriminatory? I know it will get it wrong sometimes, and you can say it re-inforces stereotypes, but if it will get it right most of the time based on strict statistical inference, seems like it could at least be configured. It seems to be a case where the AI is a bit too accurate... I don't disagree with their decision, I think given the circumstances it's actually a brilliantly safe move and keeps out of the fray as much as possible. > “The only reliable technique we have is to be conservative,” I know this is just whimsical, and a horrible logical equivocation on my part, but that's kind of funny that a large tech company decided being conservative might actually be useful in some cases to help protect against liberal outrage...
- cix_pkez 8y ago
  And I find it ironic that in this discussion of choosing words carefully, we still use the basically meaningless (because of all of the different ways to use them) words "conservative" and "liberal". The words have nonpolitical meanings, and political meanings. And even the political meanings are inconsistent.
- ncr100 8y ago
  A more product quality reason - besides political - is the implicit bias corrupts intent.
- damnyou 8y ago
  Yes, the goal of the modern Civil Rights Movement has basically been to say "in these areas, even though Bayesian inference produces statistically valid results, we as a society have decided that it's immoral to use it." What axes are OK to use Bayesian inference on and what are not is a philosophical and historical question with lots of practical implications across politics, economics, actuarial science etc. It's really worth thinking about. But here's a start: in general, people are more forgiving of inferring data from mutable traits than immutable ones.
gp7 8y ago
For people who are eager to think this is a don't-assume-gender charade: try misgendering a cis person next time you're out, and see how much they don't care. _You_ are who this is for
- MockObject 8y ago
  I don't follow. I get misgendered quite commonly. It doesn't bother me at all. Is it supposed to?
  - gizmo686 8y ago
    I've never been offended by getting misgendered, but hearing people get misgendered does, at times, bother me in the sense that it can make the sentence difficult to understand.
- true_religion 8y ago
  I get misgendered all the time due to the fact my first name is used almost exclusively for girls in the USA. It does not bother me very much. I know this is annecdotal, but you did ask. Edit: In case, one is curious or unbelieving. Consider that my name is Nikita.
cabaalis 8y ago
Gender is a big thing to get wrong in person. I am a man, If someone referred to me as "she" or "her" I would correct them. I wouldn't expect any less from anybody. When it's a machine doing it though, some unknown piece of metal spitting out a form message, it seems it would be easier to forgive.
1023bytes 8y ago
replace(/^(him|her)/gi, "them") Here you go Google, I fixed it for you
- npcdevops 8y ago
  you nailed it, Step 1: Over engineer the problem to virtue signal for a culture war win. Step 2: Maintain control of culture. Step 3: Profit
mariopt 8y ago
This is ridiculous. Jordan Peterson had to fight back this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_UbmaZQx74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_UbmaZQx74 The gender neutral is just a dangerous ideology. The example in the article is not even good: Article example: Type the neutral Turkish phrase “one is a soldier” into Google Translate and it spits out “he’s a soldier” in English. Ok, since armies worldwide are mostly composed by men due to their physical strength and biologically design to fight. Is it unfair in any way to assume a "he" rather than a "she"? Not at all. It's just naturally that genders have different preferences and some words are associated with one or another. This politically correctness bullshit is just a way to control what people can say and think. I get that AIs need to be moderate to avoid things like this: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610634/microsofts-neo-nazi-sexbot-was-a-great-lesson-for-makers-of-ai-assistants/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610634/microsofts-neo-naz... This gender thing is just retarded. Women today enjoy greater benefits and freedom than ever, makes no sense to police the languages. In German, Portuguese, French, etc. words have gender like male, female and neutral. In English there is no gender in the word but you can attach it by pronoun. Honestly, no one feels oppressed by this. If in a group there is 1 man and 2 women, (in Portuguese) we call the group "eles" which is "male they" and it's a cultural thing and no one cares about this. Gender in word has an immense importance to poetry where you can invoke cultural properties of each gender in romantic languages. This gender ideology wants to people to thing that men and women are the same thing but (f* obviously) are not.
- elliekelly 8y ago
  > The gender neutral is just a dangerous ideology. Yet you're linking to Jordan Peterson videos. Maybe it's time for you to explore the world outside of your red pill bubble for a bit.
  - mariopt 8y ago
    Because it's related. The underlying issue is a political one that it's making it's way to several fields. This is not about red pill or hate, it's about common sense. The translation "He's a soldier" will probably be accurate 99% of the time because... you know... armies are mostly made by men. It's likely that in the training dataset, "She's a soldier" doesn't appear as often. If the autocomplete/translation suggestion is not accurate, you can drag the cursor, click and edit it. Problem solved. The autocomplete is not meant to be biased or 100% accurate all the time. Being an AI, will need a huge dataset of text to provide the autocomplete. Gender is just one variable that is there, what matters for the product is that it will get the intention right most of the times.
CJKinni 8y ago
I'm confused by any outrage over this. It's a tool that's meant to predict things, and they weren't able to successfully predict something that is used extremely frequently in lots of conversations. So they decided, after 'several' other attempts, that they were best off not trying to make suggestions. If you can't do something right after repeated attempts, don't do it.
JacobJans 8y ago
I don't know whether other people do this, but when using voice recognition software, such as Google's, I "learn" what it is likely to understand, and then modify my statements to be more easily understood by the software. This is very useful when sending text messages, for example. I am able to quickly send a message in just a moment. However, because of Google's limitations, the language I use is modified. Their "AI" is shaping my use of language, and thus, how I communicate with others. Multiply this by millions (billions?) of people, and this could have a real impact on culture. What is Google's responsibility, in this regard? Certainly they shouldn't ignore the ways their technology could affect society. They should be making conscious, deliberate decisions. This is dangerous territory; and not an easy one to navigate. I am glad they seem to recognize that.
emiliobumachar 8y ago
I, for one, applaud this move. These times are indeed hyper-sensitive, and ridiculous exaggerations do occur. This is not one of them. Gender dysphoria is a real, crippling, dangerous mental illness. Maybe in the future there'll be some pill or simple brain surgery that fixes it. Today, there's none of that. Gender reassignment surgery generally helps. Calling people their preferred gender helps, as a complement or substitute to surgery. It's a hacky, inelegant solution, perhaps disgusting to some, but it fucking works! Goind the extra mile to avoid misgendering people is reasonable. "Imagine if we could give depressed people a much higher quality of life merely by giving them cheap natural hormones. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in the world who wouldn’t celebrate that as one of the biggest mental health advances in a generation. Imagine if we could ameliorate schizophrenia with one safe simple surgery, just snip snip you’re not schizophrenic anymore. Pretty sure that would win all of the Nobel prizes. Imagine that we could make a serious dent in bipolar disorder just by calling people different pronouns. I’m pretty sure the entire mental health field would join together in bludgeoning anybody who refused to do that. We would bludgeon them over the head with big books about the side effects of lithium." From http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-mad...
awkward 8y ago
If automatic suggestion tools had more than a markov chain like understanding of language they likely would have been able to identify this as a use case and had a culturally appropriate UI. As is, completely blocking references to gender is the only way to fix the issue.
Jorge1o1 8y ago
Heaven forbid that the millions of mindless sheeple using “Smart” Compose actually have to read and edit their email before hitting send. If Google really cared about combatting bias, they would just use “she/her.” At least it would be grammatically correct. It’s not about taking a political/social stance to them, it’s about making life convenient for their users by removing any form of cognitive processing necessary
lifeformed 8y ago
Is it just me or does it seem like the only people getting upset in these situations are the people offended by others trying not to offend others? It just doesn't seem like a big deal either way. It's weird that people automatically view actions like this as some sort of moral command, and thus feel so strongly about it. At the end of the day, it's just a design choice to reduce inaccuracies. It's not something I would've thought to do myself, but I can see the reasoning for it. Bias in AI is a real issue, and it's wise to consider it earlier than later. Sometimes it's something more culturally visible, like in this situation, but oftentimes it can be much more subtle and insidious. This step isn't going to fix much but it's part of a bigger effort to make considering bias one of the priorities. Ignoring bias in our AI will make our AI more human in all the bad ways. On the other hand, Smart Compose already seems like a bad idea to me. It's good for their AI but bad for humans. This pronoun action feels like a micro optimization for this technology's social impact, while the entire feature itself is a small net harm for society, in my opinion. It's a subtle dampening of our personal voice and nuances.
- DogPawHat 8y ago
  Yeah, people are getting worked up about a good faith trade off in software features made by a company trying to create products useable by, preferably, every single person on the planet. And since gender is something were are - right now, whether you like it or not - revising our understanding of, it makes sense to wait until you have a better solution to the problem. I mean, autocorrect can only take you so far anyway, your gonna have to change it a bit anyway and I assume most people with two brain cells knows the gender and preferred pronouns of the people mentioned in the convo and knows how to use them properly even if they don't have a clue about the pronoun debate. This is an edge case, but still something they saw value in avoiding a mistake in.
feefie 8y ago
I read the article and I find this fascinating. I am happy they are giving it some thought. Pronoun political correctness (a.k.a. thoughtfulness or respectfulness) aside, if our society's training data leads AIs to make assumptions, we should be aware of it and be careful to detect it. An incorrect pronoun isn't going to kill someone -- but we are gradually handing over more and more decisions to technologies that rely on AI/ML. Perhaps investigations into incorrect pronoun assumptions can lead to improvements in assumption errors in other areas (e.g. you think your self driving vehicle doesn't need radars and that only using cameras is sufficient? Just because it looks like a big fluffy cloud doesn't necessarily mean you can safely fly/drive through it). Back to just pronouns though: if someone says "My teacher assigned me to read Act I of Macbeth tonight", most people would avoid a reply that uses he/she until an indication was given or they'd just ask "Who's that, Ms. McFadden? Yeah, I know, she assigns way too much homework!". If a human can be smart enough to get it right, then I'm glad folks are working on AIs getting it right too (or, for now, not making assumptions until they can get it right). The fact that AIs are advanced enough for us to be thinking about these kinds of details is wonderful! :)
vowelless 8y ago
Is this gender pronoun controversy primarily in English speaking populations? In other languages, almost every word is gendered. How will they tackle this problem of assuming gender in them?
lujim 8y ago
Anyone care to guess what the ratio is between trans people that are offended by the pronoun issue vs liberal college kids that are offended on behalf of the trans community? Yes I realize that saying this on hacker news or reddit is grounds for heavy downvotes and hate mail but good god people. This is all political gaming, not compassion.

58 points by eplanit 8y ago

It’s getting too much...this whole ideology will self implode.

When will this madness end? There will always be people offended by something. I'm pretty sure there are individuals claiming that NOT suggesting their pronoun deprives them of their identity, dignity or whatever. This is getting ridiculous.

danharaj 8y ago
> There will always be people offended by something. That does not mean every instance of offense should be ignored or dismissed, does it? How about addressing specific grievances instead of this extremely vague proclamation?
- umvi 8y ago
  How do you determine if the grievance is valid or not? Sometimes "addressing specific grievances" should be to recommend the greivers apply for therapy. There are people up in arms about Maryland's flag because the checkered pattern is a confederacy symbol which somehow triggers them. The best course of action for those people is not to change the Maryland flag but rather to get them therapy so they can learn how to live without getting offended.
  - danharaj 8y ago
    > How do you determine if the grievance is valid or not? I can't give you an algorithm in advance that will let you decide every political and social issue ever. That's obviously not possible. There are heuristics, like. You can put yourself in the other person's shoes, try to empathize with them to figure out where they're coming from, and work out what their values and their reasoning is. You're a human being, a social creature whose most distinctive characteristic is extremely complex and nuanced communication. Your brain was made for this. > There are people up in arms about Maryland's flag because the checkered pattern is a confederacy symbol which somehow triggers them. The best course of action for those people is not to change the Maryland flag but rather to get them therapy so they can learn how to live without getting offended. I'm gonna let you in on a secret. If you treat everyone with contempt and dismissal, then every conclusion you come to about them will be contemptful dismissal.
  - elliekelly 8y ago
    >Sometimes "addressing specific grievances" should be to recommend the greivers apply for therapy. People often assume I'm a man on reddit. A lot of the time I'll politely let them know that not everyone on reddit is a man. Are you suggesting that I ought to go to therapy instead?
    - umvi 8y ago
      If you became offended that someone assumed you were a man, then yes, I would recommend therapy. Politely correcting them? Of course not, that's a completely reasonable thing to do. Consistently taking offense where none was intended warrants therapy in my book.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - Double_a_92 8y ago
      If you became offended that someone assumed you were a man, then yes, I would recommend therapy. Politely correcting them? Of course not, that's a completely reasonable thing to do. Consistently taking offense where none was intended warrants therapy in my book.
Quarrelsome 8y ago
The madness is gendered words to be buried so deeply in our psyche in the first place. There's limited need for those assumptions but due to history we let them rise to the top. Its perfectly straight forward to write evocative and passionate prose without concreting to a gender. It makes sense that when we build general purpose tools we encourage them to choose the neutral words more readily because it increases their accuracy without any loss of meaning. Are you really so terrified of a world where "meeting him" is "meeting them"?
Robelius 8y ago
>There will always be people offended by something. Trying to remove bias from a system is about trying to remove bias from a system. People tend to agree that removing bias from a system rather than intentionally creating a system that discriminates.
- vorticalbox 8y ago
  that's how a lot of these AI work you weight bias' to more towards the result you want.
Double_a_92 8y ago
@Quarrelsome: "Them" wouldn't work here, because it's one specific person which has a concrete gender. 99% of people would assume that the investor is some company with multiple people if you say "them".
- slothtrop 8y ago
  "You" and "They" is proper usage, it has been well before this whole dialog came into play. It's a catch-all. There's nothing about a made-up pronoun that captures an ambiguity about an individual, let alone their individuality. They have to express that themselves. Pronouns are not what jeopardizes or validates individuality.
  - Double_a_92 8y ago
    I agree on "they" but not "theM". Also I would only use "they" when talking about some generic person that really doesn't have a specific gender (or any other specific characteristics). If I'm writing an email about my investor I know who that is and what gender they are. Getting "them" as completion option is almost never what I would wan't in that case. (Above I even used "they" subconsciously, because It was just an example and I don't actually have an investor to talk about here.)
bicubic 8y ago
Tech industry in 2018: ML driven automation widening wealth disparity? Eh. ML ushering in the age of the persistent surveillance state? Eh. ML being used to manipulate elections and hijack democracies? Eh. ML might auto-suggest wrong gender in a text editor? STOP. EVERYTHING. THE RISK IS TOO HIGH IT MIGHT OFFEND SOME USERS.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  The connecting thread through all of them but the last is that there is some cost or difficulty to doing something about them, whereas the last is just a ticket in the bugtracker. Wouldn't it be nice for Google if all the activism in the world was directed towards things that could be solved at no cost by a junior engineer?
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  This encapsulates the modern technocratic 'left' as much as anything.
pasabagi 8y ago
I think the problem is orthogonal to what you're upset about: 1. People expect public organizations to not be bigoted. 2. People are generally fairly bigoted. Therefore, if you're an organization training NNs on data produced by 2, you have to do some editing, or you're going to get in trouble over 1.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
> I'm pretty sure there are individuals claiming that NOT suggesting their pronoun deprives them of their identity, dignity or whatever. This would be similar to how feminist movements in languages that systematically distinguish men from women push to get the language changed so that women are referred to as men ("there shouldn't be any difference between a waiter and a waitress"), while feminist movements in languages that don't draw the distinction push to get the language changed so that women are referred to explicitly as women ("we should acknowledge that women can be waiters too"). If feminism demands one of these things, it surely can't also demand the other.
- woah 8y ago
  What are you talking about?
- VikingCoder 8y ago
  ...OR.... Different groups of people call themselves "feminists," and don't agree with each other about changes they'd like to see in the world. It's kind of odd to me that people (like you apparently) don't understand.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    What is it that you think I don't understand? I think they all agree that they'd like other people to change as an acknowledgement of their power. I also think that they can't both use the same justification to argue for opposite changes. What did I miss?
    - VikingCoder 8y ago
      "they" is not a homogeneous group. "they" are different groups that might use the same label. They can absolutely use the same justification, to argue for opposite changes. Their justification could be as simple as, "We want to be respected," and different groups of feminists disagree with each other about how best to achieve that goal. Sure, it's even worse if you personally land in the crosshairs, but from your example it sounds like the feminists are working in different places with different languages. And perhaps the problem of gaining respect requires different solutions in different areas.
SolaceQuantum 8y ago
I don't believe this is a move based off of the sensitivity at Google's workplace, especially given what we know now of Google's policies around workplace harassment. I would hesitate to extend it to Google's culture as a whole, or any political movement that is being partaken in here.
lukev 8y ago
> There will always be people offended by something Including, apparently, the fact that some people are making an effort to care about other people.
- bgfmarks 8y ago
  And making a lot of money in the process of "caring". The majority of people who "care" would have no cushy job otherwise. This applies to programmers implementing useless features, social scientists, politicians, administrators and many more.
  - lukev 8y ago
    If you think people who are working to improve the social climate in which we find ourselves are in it for the money, I can only conclude you don't know any of them.
    - throwaway8879 8y ago
      I hate to break it to you, but a lot of that caring is also based on a profit motive. Some of it isn't, but some of it certainly is.
- hueving 8y ago
  Right, and politicians are only in it to represent the people. /s
_pmf_ 8y ago
Oh, they're only getting started. As with the recent Twitter ToS changes, you'll be committing violations of concepts that you have never heard of.
schalab 8y ago
Its a game of diminishing returns. Assume there are 80% included in a game and 20% frozen out. Here it makes sense to change the rules of the game to include the other 20%. Yes it might slightly inconvenience the 80% but the switch from not being included at all to playing the game for the 20% is huge. So, overall it might be a net positive. Problem is when you get to a 98/2 split. Is it worth it to inconvenience such a large majority for the benefit of a very small minority. And how much are you going to change the rules? Is it worth the reduced enjoyment/efficiency of the game? At some point the trade off will become too much, and even moral/emotional arguments will not be enough to silence the dissent.
- 2a0c40 8y ago
  relevant: Taleb's minority rule. cf. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
- pjc50 8y ago
  In this case it's more like a 50/50 split.
- mobjack 8y ago
  Is it really that big of an inconvenience if they don't include gender pronouns in automated email responses? How much revenue would Google be losing over such a decision? Even if something only affects 2% of the population, the cost of getting it wrong may not be worth the benefits.
jackhack 8y ago
It will end with the boot of the state stamping of the face of Winston Smith, and Winston expressing his love for Big Brother. Newspeak. When I first read 1984 I thought it so farfetched as to be laughable. I'm not laughing any more.
xbryanx 8y ago
Asking people to refer to you how you want to be addressed is not madness, it's just considerate.
- voyager2 8y ago
  Asking people to refer to you how you want to be addressed IS madness. You must then ask every person how to refer to him/her/them/it/cis/trans/pan before you assume standard English is good enough.
  - xbryanx 8y ago
    Your madness is my ideal. I really enjoy living in a time that recognizes more than a binary sense of gender identity. Our language should change to address this. Just like it has changed to recognize that we use computers now.
    - voyager2 8y ago
      Please do not refer to madness as "your." "This" would be preferable. Also, I do not recognize that "our" language should change to address a tiny minority wishing to be referred to in a non-binary sense. The analog between using computers and non-binary self-identification is a strawman/woman/person/thing. Which straw<something> will be acceptable?
- wang_li 8y ago
  Being offended when an algorithm picks one of two words that represent 99.9+% of the population is madness. Also the words in question are not used to address a person. When I am speaking to a person, regardless of their gender identity, I use the second person pronouns you, yours, or yourself. These are already gender neutral. The requested gender neutral pronouns (xir/xe/ne/???) are used in the third person and lower the value of communication as there is no asexual physical presentation, people present as men or women based on their fashion and physical characteristics. Going to a restaurant and saying to the attendant that you are here to me "that xir over there" does not help them figure out which table to take you to. Not to mention that people who feel gender neutral are still male or female (or have experienced a physical developmental disorder, humans are dimorphic after all.)
pjc50 8y ago
I have a feeling that if it always suggested "her" instead of always suggesting "him" there would be as much outrage, but from a different quarter.
jahewson 8y ago
Dear Mrs. bitcharmer, Guessing something with a 50% probability of being wrong is not a useful feature.
- bitcharmer 8y ago
  I think it's better than 50%. Besides, how could I be offended at that? I actually think Mrs bitcharmer sounded funny.
Mikeb85 8y ago
I'd rather simply eliminate gender specific pronouns than invent a bunch of new, ridiculous ones. > I'm pretty sure there are individuals claiming that NOT suggesting their pronoun deprives them of their identity, dignity or whatever. Yeah but the end result of everyone wanting to feel special is that in the end, no one will.
- asdkljh 8y ago
  Where would it end, if we just kept inventing pronouns? Everyone getting their own pronoun? Like, perhaps a unique name? In the end, there'd just not be any pronouns. Problem is, pronouns are useful. They compress text. One time I wrote a paper in high school where I didn't use any pronouns and always referred to Abraham Lincoln as "Abraham Lincoln", just so I could pad the paper as much as possible with the full length of Abraham Lincoln's name. "Abraham Lincoln, in Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address, suggested that Abraham Lincoln could..."

glenrivard 8y ago

That is going to further upset the right wing.

hadrien01 8y ago

> Google’s technology will not suggest gender-based pronouns because the risk is too high that its “Smart Compose” technology might predict someone’s sex or gender identity incorrectly and offend users Nobody cares when touch keyboards predict the wrong pronouns, so why would the same service in an email client be any different?

atom-morgan 8y ago
I can find you some people.
bluetidepro 8y ago
I agree. It seems a bit hyper sensitive to me. Esp when it's a machine that's predicting it, and not a human.
- levesque 8y ago
  Bias is one of the new hot topics in ML. People act surprised that a face recognition software trained on a database of white people is unable to properly classify pictures of people from all around the world. The algorithm is only learning the data it was fed.
Bartweiss 8y ago
Touch keyboards are (mostly) reliant on the user's history, so they offer a ready made "it's your own damn habits" defense that's less accessible for Google. A larger issue is that touch keyboards predict using single words and pretty quickly spiral into Markov chain incoherence if you let them draft whole messages. Smart Compose tries to offer syntactic and even semantic understanding. If I type "The investor is here, do you want to meet", my phone keyboard is working off 'meet', and will probably suggest 'up'. Smart Compose is working off 'investor' also, and apparently arrived at 'him'. (It's not clear to me from the article if this was actually tracked to specific biases, or if the predictions just adopted the default masculine.) But most of all, I'm guessing Google's core motivation is explained by the offhand comment that Smart Reply uses the same logic. A gendered pronoun suggestion probably isn't going to spark a scandal, but a feature that encourages you to send Google-drafted text unedited might be subject to a lot more scrutiny.

Double_a_92 8y ago

> Gender is a “a big, big thing” to get wrong. No it's not. Edit: Why is my personal opinion flagged? Am I really such a terrible person for thinking that way? We are so tolerant, but yet people can't have different opinions?

CzechTech 8y ago
It is in Silicon Valley.
dang 8y ago
Unsubstantive comments aren't good here, and on divisive topics are unwelcome. So the downvotes and flags were correct by local standards. On HN the idea is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html p.s. Flamewar comments, like you posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18541549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18541549 and elsewhere, will get your account banned on HN, so please don't do that.
- Double_a_92 8y ago
  The substantial point was that I do not think that gender is just an important thing to be so worried about. Googles fear of gender bias is just not reasonable, at least not in that case. Why can I not express that feeling in a short comment? Would it have been better or any clearer if I wrote a "substantial" paragraph about it? I got the feeling that "formality" is more of an excuse to remove non-echo voices from here. Almost like in a political subreddit...

walterbell 8y ago

Which pronoun(s) will be used by Google AI to address future AI tools and robots? https://www.wired.com/story/robot-gender-stereotypes/ https://www.wired.com/story/robot-gender-stereotypes/ > Robots don’t have genders—they’re metal and plastic and silicon, and filled with ones and zeroes ... The problem is that even if a robot isn’t gendered, and even if it doesn’t look human or even animal, you’ll tend to want to gender it.

johnalamosisi 8y ago

LOL

jakelazaroff 8y ago

Alternate wording: "Google's Gmail autocomplete no longer assumes gender." From the article: > Gmail product manager Paul Lambert said a company research scientist discovered the problem in January when he typed “I am meeting an investor next week,” and Smart Compose suggested a possible follow-up question: “Do you want to meet him?” instead of “her.” So really, this is a fairly reasonable decision whereby it doesn't infer gender from signals such as profession. The article doesn't address this, but I wonder what it would do given an explicit gender, e.g. "She's the investor I am meeting next week."

brobdingnagians 8y ago
True, doing antecedent linking would be neat. I think that would be a good solution in order to get highest 100% accuracy. Although, if it linked the antecedent incorrectly, it could still put them in controversy.
- jakelazaroff 8y ago
  Yeah, this is a hard problem and they probably still have mistakes in front of them. Still, though, I think "we misidentified the antecedent in this sentence" is easier to forgive than "we incorrectly assumed a gender based on profession". The former is just a grammar parsing bug, while the latter carries a lot of cultural baggage.
hueving 8y ago
So what does it follow up with? English doesn't have a non-gendered way to say "Do you want to meet him/her?" Is the idea just to eliminate all useful suggestions that contain genders?
- mitchty 8y ago
  Singular they works and has been used since the 1300's. Say do you want to meet them? would work fine in this case.
  - 8y ago

topynate 8y ago

When's the Hebrew language version coming out? There are many languages for which this "solution" is completely impracticable. On the other hand, there should be no problem with Turkish or Persian.

mc32 8y ago
They’ll have a fun time with Korean where depending on speaker and audience different word declensions are used.
gizmo686 8y ago
English is probably one of the harder languages to get gender right in, since only pronouns are gendered. In more gendered languages, the problem is easier, since the AI could just look at nearby words to make a guess. In those languages, when it gets it wrong, people would likely assume that it just picked the wrong referent, instead of assuming gender.

skrowl 8y ago

Great, now Skynet is going to believe there are 38,000 genders when it goes online.

chickenfries 8y ago

This is fine. Guessing gender based on things like name is terribly error prone. Imagine if you have a name like Taylor. But I’m sure everyone who wants to be annoyed by this will find a way to be annoyed.

Bartweiss 8y ago
Now that you point it out, I'd imagine that aside from any bias pronoun choice would also be one of the least accurate suggestions offered. When somebody writes "my cousin is in town, do you want to meet", it's basically impossible to do better than a coinflip chance - and that's if offering a pronoun next was even correct. So it's no real surprise that they didn't spend a bunch of effort on debiasing a feature that would still be wrong if they succeed.

SolaceQuantum 8y ago

I'd like to point out how long-hanging fruit this is for Google to address gender imbalance and gender inequality, especially given Google's much larger issues with their policies around inappropriate sexual behavior. You'd think more significantly, Google could work on establishing better policies and a more equal workplace culture.

thwoawayyowser 8y ago

Wait... So because the real world data doesn't align to our ideology, we're going tell it to ignore the facts

DogPawHat 8y ago
And what exactly is the real world data actually saying and how does it disprove Google's "ideology"?
- MockObject 8y ago
  It's saying that word X is usually associated with "her", and Y with "him". Often, reality has a sexist bias.

brobdingnagians 8y ago

> Men have long dominated fields such as finance and science, for example, so the technology would conclude from the data that an investor or engineer is “he” or “him.” Err, so the AI correctly predicts that statistically you probably intend "him", but we limit the utility of the tool because that would be discriminatory? I know it will get it wrong sometimes, and you can say it re-inforces stereotypes, but if it will get it right most of the time based on strict statistical inference, seems like it could at least be configured. It seems to be a case where the AI is a bit too accurate... I don't disagree with their decision, I think given the circumstances it's actually a brilliantly safe move and keeps out of the fray as much as possible. > “The only reliable technique we have is to be conservative,” I know this is just whimsical, and a horrible logical equivocation on my part, but that's kind of funny that a large tech company decided being conservative might actually be useful in some cases to help protect against liberal outrage...

cix_pkez 8y ago
And I find it ironic that in this discussion of choosing words carefully, we still use the basically meaningless (because of all of the different ways to use them) words "conservative" and "liberal". The words have nonpolitical meanings, and political meanings. And even the political meanings are inconsistent.
ncr100 8y ago
A more product quality reason - besides political - is the implicit bias corrupts intent.
damnyou 8y ago
Yes, the goal of the modern Civil Rights Movement has basically been to say "in these areas, even though Bayesian inference produces statistically valid results, we as a society have decided that it's immoral to use it." What axes are OK to use Bayesian inference on and what are not is a philosophical and historical question with lots of practical implications across politics, economics, actuarial science etc. It's really worth thinking about. But here's a start: in general, people are more forgiving of inferring data from mutable traits than immutable ones.

gp7 8y ago

For people who are eager to think this is a don't-assume-gender charade: try misgendering a cis person next time you're out, and see how much they don't care. _You_ are who this is for

MockObject 8y ago
I don't follow. I get misgendered quite commonly. It doesn't bother me at all. Is it supposed to?
- gizmo686 8y ago
  I've never been offended by getting misgendered, but hearing people get misgendered does, at times, bother me in the sense that it can make the sentence difficult to understand.
true_religion 8y ago
I get misgendered all the time due to the fact my first name is used almost exclusively for girls in the USA. It does not bother me very much. I know this is annecdotal, but you did ask. Edit: In case, one is curious or unbelieving. Consider that my name is Nikita.

cabaalis 8y ago

Gender is a big thing to get wrong in person. I am a man, If someone referred to me as "she" or "her" I would correct them. I wouldn't expect any less from anybody. When it's a machine doing it though, some unknown piece of metal spitting out a form message, it seems it would be easier to forgive.

1023bytes 8y ago

replace(/^(him|her)/gi, "them") Here you go Google, I fixed it for you

npcdevops 8y ago
you nailed it, Step 1: Over engineer the problem to virtue signal for a culture war win. Step 2: Maintain control of culture. Step 3: Profit

mariopt 8y ago

This is ridiculous. Jordan Peterson had to fight back this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_UbmaZQx74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_UbmaZQx74 The gender neutral is just a dangerous ideology. The example in the article is not even good: Article example: Type the neutral Turkish phrase “one is a soldier” into Google Translate and it spits out “he’s a soldier” in English. Ok, since armies worldwide are mostly composed by men due to their physical strength and biologically design to fight. Is it unfair in any way to assume a "he" rather than a "she"? Not at all. It's just naturally that genders have different preferences and some words are associated with one or another. This politically correctness bullshit is just a way to control what people can say and think. I get that AIs need to be moderate to avoid things like this: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610634/microsofts-neo-nazi-sexbot-was-a-great-lesson-for-makers-of-ai-assistants/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610634/microsofts-neo-naz... This gender thing is just retarded. Women today enjoy greater benefits and freedom than ever, makes no sense to police the languages. In German, Portuguese, French, etc. words have gender like male, female and neutral. In English there is no gender in the word but you can attach it by pronoun. Honestly, no one feels oppressed by this. If in a group there is 1 man and 2 women, (in Portuguese) we call the group "eles" which is "male they" and it's a cultural thing and no one cares about this. Gender in word has an immense importance to poetry where you can invoke cultural properties of each gender in romantic languages. This gender ideology wants to people to thing that men and women are the same thing but (f* obviously) are not.

elliekelly 8y ago
> The gender neutral is just a dangerous ideology. Yet you're linking to Jordan Peterson videos. Maybe it's time for you to explore the world outside of your red pill bubble for a bit.
- mariopt 8y ago
  Because it's related. The underlying issue is a political one that it's making it's way to several fields. This is not about red pill or hate, it's about common sense. The translation "He's a soldier" will probably be accurate 99% of the time because... you know... armies are mostly made by men. It's likely that in the training dataset, "She's a soldier" doesn't appear as often. If the autocomplete/translation suggestion is not accurate, you can drag the cursor, click and edit it. Problem solved. The autocomplete is not meant to be biased or 100% accurate all the time. Being an AI, will need a huge dataset of text to provide the autocomplete. Gender is just one variable that is there, what matters for the product is that it will get the intention right most of the times.

CJKinni 8y ago

I'm confused by any outrage over this. It's a tool that's meant to predict things, and they weren't able to successfully predict something that is used extremely frequently in lots of conversations. So they decided, after 'several' other attempts, that they were best off not trying to make suggestions. If you can't do something right after repeated attempts, don't do it.

JacobJans 8y ago

I don't know whether other people do this, but when using voice recognition software, such as Google's, I "learn" what it is likely to understand, and then modify my statements to be more easily understood by the software. This is very useful when sending text messages, for example. I am able to quickly send a message in just a moment. However, because of Google's limitations, the language I use is modified. Their "AI" is shaping my use of language, and thus, how I communicate with others. Multiply this by millions (billions?) of people, and this could have a real impact on culture. What is Google's responsibility, in this regard? Certainly they shouldn't ignore the ways their technology could affect society. They should be making conscious, deliberate decisions. This is dangerous territory; and not an easy one to navigate. I am glad they seem to recognize that.

emiliobumachar 8y ago

I, for one, applaud this move. These times are indeed hyper-sensitive, and ridiculous exaggerations do occur. This is not one of them. Gender dysphoria is a real, crippling, dangerous mental illness. Maybe in the future there'll be some pill or simple brain surgery that fixes it. Today, there's none of that. Gender reassignment surgery generally helps. Calling people their preferred gender helps, as a complement or substitute to surgery. It's a hacky, inelegant solution, perhaps disgusting to some, but it fucking works! Goind the extra mile to avoid misgendering people is reasonable. "Imagine if we could give depressed people a much higher quality of life merely by giving them cheap natural hormones. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in the world who wouldn’t celebrate that as one of the biggest mental health advances in a generation. Imagine if we could ameliorate schizophrenia with one safe simple surgery, just snip snip you’re not schizophrenic anymore. Pretty sure that would win all of the Nobel prizes. Imagine that we could make a serious dent in bipolar disorder just by calling people different pronouns. I’m pretty sure the entire mental health field would join together in bludgeoning anybody who refused to do that. We would bludgeon them over the head with big books about the side effects of lithium." From http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-mad...

awkward 8y ago

If automatic suggestion tools had more than a markov chain like understanding of language they likely would have been able to identify this as a use case and had a culturally appropriate UI. As is, completely blocking references to gender is the only way to fix the issue.

Jorge1o1 8y ago

Heaven forbid that the millions of mindless sheeple using “Smart” Compose actually have to read and edit their email before hitting send. If Google really cared about combatting bias, they would just use “she/her.” At least it would be grammatically correct. It’s not about taking a political/social stance to them, it’s about making life convenient for their users by removing any form of cognitive processing necessary

lifeformed 8y ago

Is it just me or does it seem like the only people getting upset in these situations are the people offended by others trying not to offend others? It just doesn't seem like a big deal either way. It's weird that people automatically view actions like this as some sort of moral command, and thus feel so strongly about it. At the end of the day, it's just a design choice to reduce inaccuracies. It's not something I would've thought to do myself, but I can see the reasoning for it. Bias in AI is a real issue, and it's wise to consider it earlier than later. Sometimes it's something more culturally visible, like in this situation, but oftentimes it can be much more subtle and insidious. This step isn't going to fix much but it's part of a bigger effort to make considering bias one of the priorities. Ignoring bias in our AI will make our AI more human in all the bad ways. On the other hand, Smart Compose already seems like a bad idea to me. It's good for their AI but bad for humans. This pronoun action feels like a micro optimization for this technology's social impact, while the entire feature itself is a small net harm for society, in my opinion. It's a subtle dampening of our personal voice and nuances.

DogPawHat 8y ago
Yeah, people are getting worked up about a good faith trade off in software features made by a company trying to create products useable by, preferably, every single person on the planet. And since gender is something were are - right now, whether you like it or not - revising our understanding of, it makes sense to wait until you have a better solution to the problem. I mean, autocorrect can only take you so far anyway, your gonna have to change it a bit anyway and I assume most people with two brain cells knows the gender and preferred pronouns of the people mentioned in the convo and knows how to use them properly even if they don't have a clue about the pronoun debate. This is an edge case, but still something they saw value in avoiding a mistake in.

feefie 8y ago

I read the article and I find this fascinating. I am happy they are giving it some thought. Pronoun political correctness (a.k.a. thoughtfulness or respectfulness) aside, if our society's training data leads AIs to make assumptions, we should be aware of it and be careful to detect it. An incorrect pronoun isn't going to kill someone -- but we are gradually handing over more and more decisions to technologies that rely on AI/ML. Perhaps investigations into incorrect pronoun assumptions can lead to improvements in assumption errors in other areas (e.g. you think your self driving vehicle doesn't need radars and that only using cameras is sufficient? Just because it looks like a big fluffy cloud doesn't necessarily mean you can safely fly/drive through it). Back to just pronouns though: if someone says "My teacher assigned me to read Act I of Macbeth tonight", most people would avoid a reply that uses he/she until an indication was given or they'd just ask "Who's that, Ms. McFadden? Yeah, I know, she assigns way too much homework!". If a human can be smart enough to get it right, then I'm glad folks are working on AIs getting it right too (or, for now, not making assumptions until they can get it right). The fact that AIs are advanced enough for us to be thinking about these kinds of details is wonderful! :)

vowelless 8y ago

Is this gender pronoun controversy primarily in English speaking populations? In other languages, almost every word is gendered. How will they tackle this problem of assuming gender in them?

lujim 8y ago

Anyone care to guess what the ratio is between trans people that are offended by the pronoun issue vs liberal college kids that are offended on behalf of the trans community? Yes I realize that saying this on hacker news or reddit is grounds for heavy downvotes and hate mail but good god people. This is all political gaming, not compassion.