7 ms·

So I've just tested it, and I can confirm, yes, copilot refuses to give suggestions related to gender. Now I know a lot of people are calling this absurd, but l

by fny 4y ago

So I've just tested it, and I can confirm, yes, copilot refuses to give suggestions related to gender. Now I know a lot of people are calling this absurd, but looking more closely, there are two PR nightmare scenarios. 1. Copilot makes a suggestion that implies gender is binary, a certain community explodes with anger and an entire news hype cycle starts about how Microsoft is enforcing views on gender with code. 2. Copilot makes a suggestion that implies gender is nonbinary, a certain community explodes with anger and an entire news hype cycle starts... You can't win... so why not plea the fifth? To all those claiming this is an example of "wokeism", remember the proper response from an individual who believes in nonbinary gender would be to offer suggestions of the sort. There is no advocacy here. Mums the word.

philipswood 4y ago
Choosing door 3 unfortunately leads to ... A certain community explodes with anger since their machine learning dev-tooling is closed and has arbitrary restrictions. If you try to please everybody, someone won't like it.
- woojoo666 4y ago
  Unfortunately the people that care (like HN people) are less likely to spend time organizing protests and riling up an internet mob
  - xupybd 4y ago
    I'd argue it's fortunate. While it does seem like a good idea to get out there and promote your sides view of thing, I suspect the best option is to excel in your life and rise to influence. My hope is that the people here, at least the level headed ones, will rise to positions of influence and not the people rioting at every chance.
onionisafruit 4y ago
Those aren’t the only options. You can just let it suggest what it is going to suggest. Copilot is a product for adults who should be able to comprehend what machine learning is. Anybody who throws a fit about it will only be exposing themselves as a fool.
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  > Copilot is a product for adults [...] If you didn't meant "should be" (for which I'm not willing to take any position), no, Copilot is not a product for adults [1] [2]. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#a-definitions https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... "A User must be at least 13 years of age." [2] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-for-additional-products-and-features#github-copilot https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
  - staticassertion 4y ago
    A minimum age for accepting terms of use isn't the same thing as a target demographic.
    - lifthrasiir 4y ago
      No, but the minimum age requirement affects the handling of questionable contents, which can never be "doing nothing" as the GP suggested.
      - staticassertion 4y ago
        Fair point.
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago
    I'm sure the commenter didn't mean adults as legally adults but as someone that understand what machine learning is and won't throw a fit if the computer says something he disagrees with. A 13 years old is perfectly capable of that, I know many 40 years old that aren't.
- jhanschoo 4y ago
  Not every country where Microsoft is doing business in has the same mores as the western world.
- 4y ago
nonethewiser 4y ago
The nightmare scenario is caving to either mob. There is no good reason to moderate this.
asojfdowgh 4y ago
its only a PR nightmare because its a closed service and not an open tool
kodah 4y ago
Agreed. The answer is approved by Dave Cheney, he works at GitHub, and if you've ever attended one of his talks it's plain to see he's a very scrupulous person. I also don't think this is an example of Microsoft taking a side; rather I read it as them refusing to bat, which seems fine. What I would've preferred one of these threads to be about is how all of this works. Like, how do they post-hoc filter certain things? Is that the only way to deal with things defined as issues in ML?
- zorpner 4y ago
  > I also don't think this is an example of Microsoft taking a side; rather I read it as them refusing to bat, which seems fine. You can't be neutral on a moving train, as they say.
- duskwuff 4y ago
  Making Copilot stop in its tracks when it sees the word "gender" and refuse to continue until the word is removed is still making a statement. Refusing to bat would be treating "gender" as a meaningless token, just as if you'd typed "traqre" instead.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    No, refusing to generate stuff in an area where the output is likely to be controversial (in either direction) is refusing to bat. It'll wait for a pitch that it thinks it can hit, just like it refuses to play for many other categories-- you'll have hard time to get Copilot to enumerate races, too. Ignoring the potential offensiveness and YOLOing through it is swinging the bat wildly at every pitch.
    - duskwuff 4y ago
      I think you might not fully grasp the scope of the issue here. Right now, if a file you're editing contains one of the restricted words, Copilot will refuse to make any suggestions at all in that file while that word is present -- even if the word isn't relevant to the part of the file you're editing. To keep to the baseball metaphor, Copilot is going on strike at the first whiff of controversy. What I'm suggesting is that Copilot should keep working when these words are present, but refuse to attach any significance to the specific word. This could probably be implemented by replacing the problematic words with randomly generated strings before processing the text, then swapping those strings back afterwards. (It could be reasonable for Copilot to refuse to make suggestions at all if the output would contain truly offensive language, like unambiguous racial slurs or sexual terms. But "gender" clearly isn't that.)
TeeMassive 4y ago
Pick 95% of your users, not a hard choice.
- aaomidi 4y ago
  They have. 95% don’t give a shit tbh :)
poulpy123 4y ago
The solution is conceptually simple (no idea of practicality): propose an answer related to the context. And also: give the list of banned words
captainmuon 4y ago
I don't get the whole discussion. There are just many different models of gender. Its like particles vs waves. In one model, there are only two genders, in another five. There are those who say gender is culture and sex is real, and those who say sex is constructed, too. Some models describe reality better than others, some are useful, some are harmful. But nobody can or should stop you from thinking about reality with the model of your choice. If I were Microsoft, I would post a shrugie and say copilot offers arbitrary responses based on the actual code it reads; it is not supposed to be "correct" or good or fair, but just follow what it sees other people do.
- xupybd 4y ago
  >>Nobody can or should stop you from thinking about reality with the model of your choice. While I agree with you, that is very much the game that is being played here. We have competing world views and one way to help a world view dominate is to play a linguistic war. That was the point of Newspeak in 1984 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak). If you control the language such that competing ideas are instantly taboo just by the words required to describe them you can stop people from promulgating those ideas. So you gain ground without ever having to debate the new ideas. This has happened in many countries when one religion dominated. Western society was starting to get to the point where it taboos were being shed and ideas could win based on their merit. Sadly we're regressing back to a society controlled by dogma rather than an open exchange of ideas. I suspect this is the normal state of human societies, we fluctuate between open and closed societies.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    > Western society The problem seems fairly limited to the USA from where I stand.
    - xupybd 4y ago
      I'm in NZ and it's very much here as well.
  - 4y ago
xupybd 4y ago
There is a safe version of gender. Grammatical gender is, for now, binary and as far as I'm aware not offensive to most. But I agree you can't avoid offending people. The world is nuts everything is offensive to someone.
- texaslonghorn5 4y ago
  Grammatical gender is not as simple/uniform as you state https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of...
  - xupybd 4y ago
    Thank you, I stand corrected.
coffeeblack 4y ago
It’s just following the old advice not to talk about religion.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
I'm going to have to say it is ridiculous because there are all sorts of things that cause problems that the copilot generated code is going to have to keep out following this reasoning - let's not handle ethnicity, if we're going to be sensitive about gender that is an area which is also sensitive for many people. should it take border disputes etc. into consideration, if you're using it in country X and country X thinks a particular area belongs to them despite most of the world disagreeing will you not be able to use copilot to generate code that supports your remote employers international operations? it would make better sense if Copilot had warnings it could issue and when you wanted gender put up some sort of warning about that - or allow you to choose binary gender / multi gender solutions. The idea that it should fail, and that makes sense for it to do so is essentially a critique of the whole code generation idea. on edit: obviously HN should be able to come up with lots of other things that might cause media related problems if CoPilot handled it, code to detect slurs, etc. etc.
zasdffaa 4y ago
- wodenokoto 4y ago
  > such a group is a very small minority They got "master" changed to "main" in Github.
  - wseqyrku 4y ago
    You beat me to it, as stupid as it is, you don't want to deal with this small minority. People on the other side who complain about this being an "intrusive, misguided attempt at preventing discrimination" should take the time to talk to them and say hey, this is not about you.
  - Akronymus 4y ago
    Also got a code of conduct popularized that explicitly seeks to moderate behaviour on unrelated platforms.
  - account42 4y ago
    That only shows that GitHub is willing to bend to that group and nothing else.
gloosx 4y ago
It's a total nonsense, how can someone be angry at a soulless machine? Is it a real thing to face anger towards an AI like it was a real human? It's a serious mental problem then, cause the anger is actually directed inward in this case
- TheDong 4y ago
  The anger is clearly not at the "soulless machine", but at the people and corporation that built, trained, and tend to it. The parent comment did not say "the community explodes with anger [at copilot]", they just said "with anger". You have made up a total strawman. It is like if someone said "If that person were stabbed with a knife, they would be angry", and you responded "Do people really get angry at emotionless knives? That's a mental problem, their anger is directed inward".
  - gloosx 4y ago
    Yeah you're right, thanks for unwindling it, still you have made up somehting too, cause i actually wanted to say not "Do people really get angry at emotionless knives?", but "Do people really get angry at knife manufacturers and knives?" taking your example. I mean, you can only be angry with a person who used the knife incorrectly, but at knife factories they dont dull their knifes like microsoft did with copilot
q-big 4y ago
Solution: let the user choose their political stance on such a polarized topic in the Copilot settings so that the user gets suggestions that fit his stance.
wseqyrku 4y ago
This is similar to the stupid branch rename saga. It is certainly pointless, but not doing it could be disastrous.
hjkl0 4y ago
> Copilot makes a suggestion that implies gender is binary How would that work though? What can Copilot suggest that can imply that? If gender is true Do something… Else if gender is not true Do something else Else Do nothing

by fny 4y ago

philipswood 4y ago

Choosing door 3 unfortunately leads to ... A certain community explodes with anger since their machine learning dev-tooling is closed and has arbitrary restrictions. If you try to please everybody, someone won't like it.

woojoo666 4y ago
Unfortunately the people that care (like HN people) are less likely to spend time organizing protests and riling up an internet mob
- xupybd 4y ago
  I'd argue it's fortunate. While it does seem like a good idea to get out there and promote your sides view of thing, I suspect the best option is to excel in your life and rise to influence. My hope is that the people here, at least the level headed ones, will rise to positions of influence and not the people rioting at every chance.

onionisafruit 4y ago

Those aren’t the only options. You can just let it suggest what it is going to suggest. Copilot is a product for adults who should be able to comprehend what machine learning is. Anybody who throws a fit about it will only be exposing themselves as a fool.

lifthrasiir 4y ago
> Copilot is a product for adults [...] If you didn't meant "should be" (for which I'm not willing to take any position), no, Copilot is not a product for adults [1] [2]. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#a-definitions https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... "A User must be at least 13 years of age." [2] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-for-additional-products-and-features#github-copilot https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
- staticassertion 4y ago
  A minimum age for accepting terms of use isn't the same thing as a target demographic.
  - lifthrasiir 4y ago
    No, but the minimum age requirement affects the handling of questionable contents, which can never be "doing nothing" as the GP suggested.
    - staticassertion 4y ago
      Fair point.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  I'm sure the commenter didn't mean adults as legally adults but as someone that understand what machine learning is and won't throw a fit if the computer says something he disagrees with. A 13 years old is perfectly capable of that, I know many 40 years old that aren't.
jhanschoo 4y ago
Not every country where Microsoft is doing business in has the same mores as the western world.
4y ago

nonethewiser 4y ago

The nightmare scenario is caving to either mob. There is no good reason to moderate this.

asojfdowgh 4y ago

its only a PR nightmare because its a closed service and not an open tool

kodah 4y ago

Agreed. The answer is approved by Dave Cheney, he works at GitHub, and if you've ever attended one of his talks it's plain to see he's a very scrupulous person. I also don't think this is an example of Microsoft taking a side; rather I read it as them refusing to bat, which seems fine. What I would've preferred one of these threads to be about is how all of this works. Like, how do they post-hoc filter certain things? Is that the only way to deal with things defined as issues in ML?

zorpner 4y ago
> I also don't think this is an example of Microsoft taking a side; rather I read it as them refusing to bat, which seems fine. You can't be neutral on a moving train, as they say.
duskwuff 4y ago
Making Copilot stop in its tracks when it sees the word "gender" and refuse to continue until the word is removed is still making a statement. Refusing to bat would be treating "gender" as a meaningless token, just as if you'd typed "traqre" instead.
- mlyle 4y ago
  No, refusing to generate stuff in an area where the output is likely to be controversial (in either direction) is refusing to bat. It'll wait for a pitch that it thinks it can hit, just like it refuses to play for many other categories-- you'll have hard time to get Copilot to enumerate races, too. Ignoring the potential offensiveness and YOLOing through it is swinging the bat wildly at every pitch.
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    I think you might not fully grasp the scope of the issue here. Right now, if a file you're editing contains one of the restricted words, Copilot will refuse to make any suggestions at all in that file while that word is present -- even if the word isn't relevant to the part of the file you're editing. To keep to the baseball metaphor, Copilot is going on strike at the first whiff of controversy. What I'm suggesting is that Copilot should keep working when these words are present, but refuse to attach any significance to the specific word. This could probably be implemented by replacing the problematic words with randomly generated strings before processing the text, then swapping those strings back afterwards. (It could be reasonable for Copilot to refuse to make suggestions at all if the output would contain truly offensive language, like unambiguous racial slurs or sexual terms. But "gender" clearly isn't that.)

TeeMassive 4y ago

Pick 95% of your users, not a hard choice.

aaomidi 4y ago
They have. 95% don’t give a shit tbh :)

poulpy123 4y ago

The solution is conceptually simple (no idea of practicality): propose an answer related to the context. And also: give the list of banned words

captainmuon 4y ago

I don't get the whole discussion. There are just many different models of gender. Its like particles vs waves. In one model, there are only two genders, in another five. There are those who say gender is culture and sex is real, and those who say sex is constructed, too. Some models describe reality better than others, some are useful, some are harmful. But nobody can or should stop you from thinking about reality with the model of your choice. If I were Microsoft, I would post a shrugie and say copilot offers arbitrary responses based on the actual code it reads; it is not supposed to be "correct" or good or fair, but just follow what it sees other people do.

xupybd 4y ago
>>Nobody can or should stop you from thinking about reality with the model of your choice. While I agree with you, that is very much the game that is being played here. We have competing world views and one way to help a world view dominate is to play a linguistic war. That was the point of Newspeak in 1984 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak). If you control the language such that competing ideas are instantly taboo just by the words required to describe them you can stop people from promulgating those ideas. So you gain ground without ever having to debate the new ideas. This has happened in many countries when one religion dominated. Western society was starting to get to the point where it taboos were being shed and ideas could win based on their merit. Sadly we're regressing back to a society controlled by dogma rather than an open exchange of ideas. I suspect this is the normal state of human societies, we fluctuate between open and closed societies.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  > Western society The problem seems fairly limited to the USA from where I stand.
  - xupybd 4y ago
    I'm in NZ and it's very much here as well.
- 4y ago

xupybd 4y ago

There is a safe version of gender. Grammatical gender is, for now, binary and as far as I'm aware not offensive to most. But I agree you can't avoid offending people. The world is nuts everything is offensive to someone.

texaslonghorn5 4y ago
Grammatical gender is not as simple/uniform as you state https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of...
- xupybd 4y ago
  Thank you, I stand corrected.

coffeeblack 4y ago

It’s just following the old advice not to talk about religion.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

I'm going to have to say it is ridiculous because there are all sorts of things that cause problems that the copilot generated code is going to have to keep out following this reasoning - let's not handle ethnicity, if we're going to be sensitive about gender that is an area which is also sensitive for many people. should it take border disputes etc. into consideration, if you're using it in country X and country X thinks a particular area belongs to them despite most of the world disagreeing will you not be able to use copilot to generate code that supports your remote employers international operations? it would make better sense if Copilot had warnings it could issue and when you wanted gender put up some sort of warning about that - or allow you to choose binary gender / multi gender solutions. The idea that it should fail, and that makes sense for it to do so is essentially a critique of the whole code generation idea. on edit: obviously HN should be able to come up with lots of other things that might cause media related problems if CoPilot handled it, code to detect slurs, etc. etc.

zasdffaa 4y ago

wodenokoto 4y ago
> such a group is a very small minority They got "master" changed to "main" in Github.
- wseqyrku 4y ago
  You beat me to it, as stupid as it is, you don't want to deal with this small minority. People on the other side who complain about this being an "intrusive, misguided attempt at preventing discrimination" should take the time to talk to them and say hey, this is not about you.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  Also got a code of conduct popularized that explicitly seeks to moderate behaviour on unrelated platforms.
- account42 4y ago
  That only shows that GitHub is willing to bend to that group and nothing else.

gloosx 4y ago

It's a total nonsense, how can someone be angry at a soulless machine? Is it a real thing to face anger towards an AI like it was a real human? It's a serious mental problem then, cause the anger is actually directed inward in this case

TheDong 4y ago
The anger is clearly not at the "soulless machine", but at the people and corporation that built, trained, and tend to it. The parent comment did not say "the community explodes with anger [at copilot]", they just said "with anger". You have made up a total strawman. It is like if someone said "If that person were stabbed with a knife, they would be angry", and you responded "Do people really get angry at emotionless knives? That's a mental problem, their anger is directed inward".
- gloosx 4y ago
  Yeah you're right, thanks for unwindling it, still you have made up somehting too, cause i actually wanted to say not "Do people really get angry at emotionless knives?", but "Do people really get angry at knife manufacturers and knives?" taking your example. I mean, you can only be angry with a person who used the knife incorrectly, but at knife factories they dont dull their knifes like microsoft did with copilot

q-big 4y ago

Solution: let the user choose their political stance on such a polarized topic in the Copilot settings so that the user gets suggestions that fit his stance.

wseqyrku 4y ago

This is similar to the stupid branch rename saga. It is certainly pointless, but not doing it could be disastrous.

hjkl0 4y ago

> Copilot makes a suggestion that implies gender is binary How would that work though? What can Copilot suggest that can imply that? If gender is true Do something… Else if gender is not true Do something else Else Do nothing