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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 ma

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.
alasdair_ 4y ago
The problem is that if you train an ML model with a bunch of data that happened to be available in the past, then the system will perpetuate the same biases as were inherent in the training data. This leads to the (real issue) Google image classifier categorizing an image of a black man as a "gorilla" etc. Certain words are heavily loaded and are worth just skipping to avoid all the hassle for now.
- eru 4y ago
  Btw, the gorilla incident was overblown. Overblown in the sense that people from other races (including whites) were also classified as some hilarious animals. Gorilla and black just was the most politically charged one of the bunch. (The other potentially politically charged one was some tendency to misclassify people of various levels of body fats as various animals.) > Certain words are heavily loaded and are worth just skipping to avoid all the hassle for now. If memory serves right, that was Google's pragmatic solution: if they detected a human in the picture, they 'manually' suppressed the animal classification. So they lost being able to classify 'Bob and his dog' in return for not accidentally classifying a picture of just Alice as a picture of a seal.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  - alasdair_ 4y ago
    >That's just reality. Except it really isn't. If the datasets used, truly represented everyone in the world, that would be a reasonable argument. The point is that right now, the most cheaply available and voluminous data sets online tend to have a whole bunch of examples from western nations and far fewer from other parts of the world, for the simple reason that historically most of the people taking photographs and sticking them on webservers were from those places. "Reality" doesn't have the same statistical anomalies as these data sets (e.g. there are a hell of a lot more people with brown skin in the world than are included in common training data), so "that's just reality" really isn't a strong argument. This is a very, very common problem in ML and isn't limited to politically-charged words. For example, in some of the earliest attempts at using computer vision to detect tanks in an image for military purposes, the photographs with tanks in them all had different lighting than the ones without tanks and so the (super simplistic ML model) overfit the model based on a bias in the data. Unless the data set is truly representative, you'll often get biases in the resultant model. > If you have your own set of politically correct answers hardcoded by a team of blue haired people you're not doing machine learning. Well, this is just silly. We all know Deepmind has a policy of only allowing green hair dye on campus.
eru 4y ago
I might even share your idea about adults _should_ behave. But that doesn't invalidate fny's musings based on how _adults_ do behave.
- sbr464 4y ago
  I would love to see a origin/latin etc breakdown of the word behave. One of my least favorite words (authority issues much? Yes).
  - majou 4y ago
    https://www.etymonline.com/word/behave#etymonline_v_8255 https://www.etymonline.com/word/behave#etymonline_v_8255
smsm42 4y ago
That implies corporations are ruled by adults that aren't confusing twitter with the real world and aren't afraid to tell the screeching activists to leave them alone. Nothing we've seen in the latest decade suggests it is even close to being the case.
benhurmarcel 4y ago
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot-after-it-turned-into-racist-nazi/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...
- oars 4y ago
  Didn't know about this. Thank you for making my day. (Disclosure: I used to work at Microsoft)
classified 4y ago
Most humans are fools. And you'll get a lot of flak if they think you stepped on their toes.
wseqyrku 4y ago

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.

alasdair_ 4y ago

The problem is that if you train an ML model with a bunch of data that happened to be available in the past, then the system will perpetuate the same biases as were inherent in the training data. This leads to the (real issue) Google image classifier categorizing an image of a black man as a "gorilla" etc. Certain words are heavily loaded and are worth just skipping to avoid all the hassle for now.

eru 4y ago
Btw, the gorilla incident was overblown. Overblown in the sense that people from other races (including whites) were also classified as some hilarious animals. Gorilla and black just was the most politically charged one of the bunch. (The other potentially politically charged one was some tendency to misclassify people of various levels of body fats as various animals.) > Certain words are heavily loaded and are worth just skipping to avoid all the hassle for now. If memory serves right, that was Google's pragmatic solution: if they detected a human in the picture, they 'manually' suppressed the animal classification. So they lost being able to classify 'Bob and his dog' in return for not accidentally classifying a picture of just Alice as a picture of a seal.
jokethrowaway 4y ago
- alasdair_ 4y ago
  >That's just reality. Except it really isn't. If the datasets used, truly represented everyone in the world, that would be a reasonable argument. The point is that right now, the most cheaply available and voluminous data sets online tend to have a whole bunch of examples from western nations and far fewer from other parts of the world, for the simple reason that historically most of the people taking photographs and sticking them on webservers were from those places. "Reality" doesn't have the same statistical anomalies as these data sets (e.g. there are a hell of a lot more people with brown skin in the world than are included in common training data), so "that's just reality" really isn't a strong argument. This is a very, very common problem in ML and isn't limited to politically-charged words. For example, in some of the earliest attempts at using computer vision to detect tanks in an image for military purposes, the photographs with tanks in them all had different lighting than the ones without tanks and so the (super simplistic ML model) overfit the model based on a bias in the data. Unless the data set is truly representative, you'll often get biases in the resultant model. > If you have your own set of politically correct answers hardcoded by a team of blue haired people you're not doing machine learning. Well, this is just silly. We all know Deepmind has a policy of only allowing green hair dye on campus.

eru 4y ago

I might even share your idea about adults _should_ behave. But that doesn't invalidate fny's musings based on how _adults_ do behave.

sbr464 4y ago
I would love to see a origin/latin etc breakdown of the word behave. One of my least favorite words (authority issues much? Yes).
- majou 4y ago
  https://www.etymonline.com/word/behave#etymonline_v_8255 https://www.etymonline.com/word/behave#etymonline_v_8255

smsm42 4y ago

That implies corporations are ruled by adults that aren't confusing twitter with the real world and aren't afraid to tell the screeching activists to leave them alone. Nothing we've seen in the latest decade suggests it is even close to being the case.

benhurmarcel 4y ago

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot-after-it-turned-into-racist-nazi/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...

oars 4y ago
Didn't know about this. Thank you for making my day. (Disclosure: I used to work at Microsoft)

classified 4y ago

Most humans are fools. And you'll get a lot of flak if they think you stepped on their toes.

wseqyrku 4y ago