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Copilot stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from GitHub (2023)
- alistairSH 2y ago2023. And apparently working based on the most recent comment.
- Hizonner 2y agoUse the cloud, sign up for random stupid breakage.
- bugtodiffer 2y agoThis title does not do the issue justice
- klibertp 2y agoThe news is that it actually started working again some time ago. Indeed, this: (cl-defstruct person gender) (make-person :gender "m<|>") with cursor at <|> does elicit "male" completion. Yay for normalcy? (Though honestly, I didn't notice this earlier - Copilot tends to hang for me too often in all kinds of files for me to identify these stopwords.) (EDIT: gotta admit though, this is hilarious: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/72603#discussioncomment-11900831 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/72603#discussi...)
- klibertp 2y agoToo late to edit, but someone chimed in in the thread linking to another issue, this time about the word "retard", here: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/79223 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/79223 From my testing, I see that one still shuts down the Copilot completely. It may mean "late" in French, but it's also often used (at least where I live) to mark SR/Slow Release versions of drugs. Apparently, now, even writing software for pharmacies is immoral and should be blocked... :D
- fifilura 2y agoBusiness opportunity to launch an LLM that specifically targets pr0n site developers.
- wkat4242 2y agoThere's some already. Some 'virtual girlfriend' services too.
- netsharc 2y agoAnd the opposite, for developers under Taliban regimes (Afghanistan, USA, where else?).
- nottorp 2y agoWhy porn site? I work on a medical application that among other things has a "Person" class which unsurprisingly has a "sex" field. If I used copilot, it would prevent the doctors from recording the patient's sex?
- wiredfool 2y agoM-x spook maybe needs a bit of an update.
- klibertp 2y agoHow could I not have known about this gem for so long?! ;; Created: May 1987 Guess I'm one of today's lucky 10000 :)
- Melonai 2y agoCisgender puberty blockers DEI woke gay homosexual California save transgender children Estradiol fascism Critical Race Theory liberal China radical leftism
- deltarholamda 2y agoI don't care how good emacs is, that function is too long.
- rightbyte 2y agoNo way this was a thing in my Emacs all this time.
- wiredfool 2y agoThat's probably why emacs meant "Eight megs and constantly swapping"
- abujazar 2y agoDoes this have anything to do with Trump & Musk recently banning everything non-binary and terms like "diversity" from government? I guess it was about time to fix this.
- 1oooqooq 2y agoyeah, for sure my friend. the populistic election fear of "the gays" wich led to the election of a guy who bribed pornstars and another not elected but who yourself already recognize as the true ruler, who raised a transgender daugther, they are alrady omnipresent as gods and impacting every aspect of everyone's life where a pronom may appear. sigh.
- RicDan 2y agoYou are seriously underselling the potential impact of things happening has on planning. Any company worth their 2 cents has contingency plans ready for several situations - i.e. if President A wins vs B, if there is enough plausibility that it might come with serious impact to the business.
- tristor 2y ago> Any company worth their 2 cents has contingency plans ready for several situations My guy, most major companies struggle to get a quarterly plan in place for what they're going to do by the start of the following quarter. There may be some department focused on lobbying and political risk that cares about this stuff, but there are no product and engineering teams at any company that have "contingency plans" just laying around to be activated for random shit like this. Nobody has time for that.
- cheschire 2y agoIndeed, because good contingency planning inherently means wasting effort on if/else paths that may never occur. I haven’t seen any recent OKR or KPI that was able to justify or even quantify the value of a path in history that didn’t occur.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- elashri 2y agoI assume that it will stop working if your code does some nuclear physics calculations /s. This is joke, actually I used it for that. But not for cool nuclear stuff that you see in the movies. And if you don't get the joke. It is about o3-mini model card having couple of pages about how they prevent it answering some nuclear and radiation questions.
- netsharc 2y agoI remember reading the Apple Quicktime EULA [1] (changed from all-caps): > The Apple software is not intended for use in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control systems, life support machines or other equipment in which the failure of the Apple software could lead to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage. [1] https://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/quicktime7.pdf https://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/quicktime7.pdf
- xyproto 2y agoI wonder if one can sneak in words into code to avoid public code to be used for training AI. Perhaps just a tiny little nazi reference.
- hbossy 2y agoThere's a +n....r license. It mandates that all copies of code include the n-word, so no big corporation can use it in their products.
- arrowsmith 2y agoI was reading someone the other day (it might have been on HN) saying they use this strategy to prevent candidates from using LLMs in interviews. E.g. a system design interview question about building an app to manage all your drug shipments and nuclear bombs.
- worksonmine 2y agoProbably not that useful to prevent the use of AI, just prompt for any shipments. In a real app the contents of the packages shouldn't be hard-coded anyway. Might prevent the really stupid who can't figure that out though.
- thrance 2y ago[flagged]
- anal_reactor 2y ago[dead]
- rightbyte 2y agoIf MS is as agile as Amazon et al. you might want to praise Bob Dylan too or something to CYA.
- mycall 2y agoI have a simple question. If censorship is considered evil regarding the written word and communications between humans, why do we want to then censor LLMs differently? It is either counterintuitive or simply a false concept we should abandon. Perhaps it is more about training, similar to how children are 'monsters' and need to be socialized/tamed.
- nemomarx 2y agoI think your first premise is incorrect, ie the groups doing this do not largely think censorship is evil.
- nkrisc 2y agoI censor myself all the time when speaking, depending on the context and who I’m speaking to. I do it because it’s typically in my best interest to do so, and because I believe that it is respectful in that moment. The things I say represent me. I don’t find it too surprising that a company might want to censor their own AI product as it represents them and their reputation.
- gedy 2y ago> If censorship is considered evil regarding the written word and communications between humans Oh it's certainly not by many people. It's fine with them if you are censoring what they don't like. It took me a long time to realize the "free speech" advocates of the 60s-80s were long gone from the left.
- conartist6 2y agoIt's to draw attention away from the fact that LLMs are amoral. You clearly have a moral spine because you're standing up and asking questions about what is right. LLMs can't do anything like that so they need to be constrained by more direct methods in order to not appear to be evil
- pjc50 2y agoThey're not being censored by the state in this case (unlike the gotcha everyone keeps using when deepseek is mentioned). They're being limited by their developers for brand safety. There's still career-ending possibilities from saying things even in the overtly antiwoke government: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-doge-staff-quit-b2693784.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic... ; people are not going to trust an LLM which might say such things on their behalf. Not to mention questions like "who is liable if an LLM libels someone".
- KronisLV 2y agoTime to buy some beefy professional GPUs with plenty of VRAM and run models locally (for example, with Ollama and Continue.dev), to get around things like this.
- CapsAdmin 2y agoOn a slightly related note, does anyone feel copilot is not as powerful as it used to be? It's kind of hard to pinpoint exactly what it is, but it feels like it often either does nothing, or generates the bare minimum. I think one concrete thing is writing a comment about a function, then expecting that function below the comment, but instead you get more comments.
- spiderfarmer 2y agoClose the comment, write 'function' and wait a little.
- littlecranky67 2y agoVery same experience. Plus, the guardrails have just become ridicioulus.
- whywhywhywhy 2y agoSeems the trend with most LLM tech is once the users are there the model is quantized or downgraded down to the bare minimum level of usefulness either silently or through new versions that are just not better in real use.
- nightfly 2y agoSee also: search engines, streaming platforms, etc...
- bugtodiffer 2y agoCapitalism <3
- mcv 2y agoYeah, I'm reluctant to trust these paid online LLMs. I want to run my own, but they're all far too big for that. Except Deepseek, which can apparently run on a Pi with an eGPU, and is apparently better than ChatGPT at coding. So running that locally should be possible and helpful and make you totally independent from whatever shenanigans these AI peddlers want to impose on you.
- regularjack 2y agoTitle has been editorialized, the correct title is: Copilot stops working on gender related subjects
- precommunicator 2y agoI had similar issues when trying to ask Copilot about master/slave replication, just error, no explanation
- nonethewiser 2y agoFor those confused about the definition of "woke", this is it.
- didntcheck 2y agoAnd yet we will still be told that these sorts of things don't exist. Or that we're the problem for complaining about them
- gioazzi 2y agoI’m somewhat “rude” in my code comments and was tripped up by this last month… took me a while to figure out while on that specific file autocomplete would stop working https://bsky.app/profile/giorgio.azzinna.ro/post/3lecq3v5gts23 https://bsky.app/profile/giorgio.azzinna.ro/post/3lecq3v5gts... Not to mention, there’s apparently some research saying code with swear words has higher quality, so if AI causes some decline there, we now know why it is https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/110mj6p/open_source_code_with_swearing_in_the_comments_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/110mj6p/open_s...
- christkv 2y agoThis is why I can't wait to just move to local models for this stuff.
- cruffle_duffle 2y agoNot just that, but models that are “independently trained” by a community of people using some kind of distributed p2p method. If this LLM stuff is as important as it is made out to be (and I think it is), it is absolutely crucial that it isn’t controlled by just a bunch of large corporations and tech oligarchs. A world where everybody needs LLM’s and the only source is from gigantic tech companies would be incredibly distopian. Plus I seriously doubt the true innovation on these things will happen until the “little guy” can train and infer their own models. Right now these things are playing it way to safe. We should be reading articles about people using home built LLMs to do crazy shit that sticks it to “The Man”. That’s how transformative technology changes things. It challenges the status quo. The only “quo” that is being challenged right now is some boring mega tech company is peeing in some other mega tech company’s cheerios. Yawn. Wake me up when this technology threatens the entire fucking system (and not fake “AGI will take over all white collar jobs”… that is just corporate propaganda). … I mean remember Napster and all those file sharing companies? Or the million iterations of Pirate Bay? Where is the LLM equivalent of that? Where is the “Linux” of LLM’s that freaks out all the tech companies? Or dark web of LLM’s that attract the eye of every three letter agency in the world? Where is the revolution? It’s just a bunch of huge tech companies safely jerking each other off wearing three layers of protection and their corporate lawyers on speed dial. How completely boring.
- feverzsj 2y agoMaybe Trump could sign an executive order to fix this.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 8organicbits 2y agoThis is really interesting. We have a company that claims to have an AI that can reason about text and that same company uses an old school hard coded censorship list. When a company doesn't use their own products, it usually tells you the product isn't up to the task.
- aziaziazi 2y agoYour strawmaning MS: pointing out a place where they don’t use their products doesn’t "prove" they don’t use it at all. They very probably use it somewhere else, and arbitrate that this particular functionality would be better served by "old school hard coded list", which also a very valable choice in many casses
- 8organicbits 2y ago> they don’t use it at all I didn't intend to imply that, but I see how my wording was unclear. I mean that LLMs don't appear to be up for these censorship-like tasks. The evidence being that a highly visible team using LLMs uses much older tech for a highly visible function. It's useful to know the limits of tech, especially novel tech, and this use case appears to be one.
- aziaziazi 2y agoIndeed I didn’t understand your first post that way. What you just wrote is much more clear. Perhaps the tech decision was also influenced by the fact that this highly visible function is also highly sensitive.
- pocketarc 2y agoOne of the companies I worked with developed software for drug rehabs. Copilot would just constantly stop autocorrecting whenever I went into code files that mentioned anything to do with drugs (or sex - that's not a new censor!). It's the main reason I switched to Supermaven (before they got bought out and gave up on updating their extension).
- lolc 2y agoWhat do you use now? I'm bummed by Supermaven not working well anymore but haven't looked around again yet.
- pocketarc 2y agoSame. I am back to Copilot sadly. I don't know that there are any other good alternatives for autocomplete (good as in: so much better than Copilot that it's worth switching to). It feels like nobody's working to improve the autocomplete/copilot experience, everyone's focused on the "chat with the code and get AI to make all the changes for you" instead of "I know what I'm doing, just predict what I'm about to type and save me the effort of typing it out".
- alkonaut 2y agoSeems to work again. But how does this happen in the first place. How could someone possibly have thought "hey I have an idea, let's put in a list of english words and just silently stop working if we have see even one of them in a substring". And people in this meeting would nod and say "yeah that sounds like an easy safety fix, let's do that". This just feels odd. This isn't a piece of forum software written by a 14 year old this is a company worth billions and filled with smart people.
- belter 2y agoBecause it was a Manager idea and the person responsible for implementing was a H1B ?
- alkonaut 2y agoI unironically think maybe you should maybe add some banned words to your own list
- belter 2y agoWhen a feature is both conceptually flawed and technically unworkable, the real question is why it still shipped. Engineers typically push back—unless job security concerns make silence the safer option... And when the decision-maker can also steer the narrative...say...by mobilizing downvotes...The outcome is predictable. :-))
- gedy 2y ago> But how does this happen in the first place Companies that are ironically filled with privileged people who "Gotta do something", since they, while sort-of well meaning, are sheltered and disconnected from actual social struggles in real life.
- loudmax 2y agoThis reminds me of rental car companies deciding they should switch their vehicle fleets to electric. A few months ago, I visited San Jose for a wedding. When I picked up my rental car at the airport, the only options were electric, even though I had specified that I wanted an ICE vehicle tat the time I made the reservation. During the four day trip I wound up visiting five different charging stations (some of which slow charged, so weren't able to replenish the battery in the time available), and I had to install three different apps. I still have like $20 of unused credit between them. I spent several hours waiting for the car to charge, not to mention making major detours looking for a fast-charging station. If I were to guess a part of the world you'd expect to find the best possible electric vehicle charging infrastructure, San Jose wouldn't be far off the mark. But my trip wound up being dominated by range anxiety. I drive a PHEV (plug-in hybrid) for my commute from home to work and I love it. Electric is the future, and it's great that electric vehicles and charging stations are becoming more common. But renting an electric car in a strange city today is about the worst possible scenario for a short range vehicle. You don't know where the charging stations are, the charging stations require different apps, your hotel might not have a charger, and so on. The people making decisions at car rental companies should know this!
- xg15 2y agoThere is some irony in Copilot refusing to work on code that contains the prefix "trans" when the whole LLM tech itself is based on "transformers"...
- ben_w 2y agoThe way the prefix is shorthand for the whole, and the issues that arise as a result, remind me of all the times this happened with other words. • https://www.haaretz.com/2010-01-20/ty-article/news-site-calls-runner-homosexual-because-his-name-is-gay/0000017f-e697-dc7e-adff-f6bfda6f0000 https://www.haaretz.com/2010-01-20/ty-article/news-site-call... • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem • My dad had a story about an all-staff memo about an "African-American tie event". • I had warnings from Apple about using "Knopf" in a description, which can only have come from the English word "knob" being literally (and inappropriately) translated into German from an English-language bad word filter, as "Knopf" isn't at all rude in German. But not this: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/31343/did-a-survey-of-conservative-christians-show-85-would-disown-their-child-if-the https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/31343/did-a-sur...
- nonethewiser 2y agoI can see why model providers wouldnt want to generate certain text for their own interests. But lets not pretend its for the benefit of users. If a company could release an unmoderated model without real risk to themselves then they should do so.
- y34h 2y agoFrom now on I'll create class named 'Gender' in each project. Not to mention I'll call my branch 'master'.
- nunez 2y agoReason #726394946263 why AI that is only truly trainable by big tech is a horrible idea.
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- mcv 2y agoRegardless of the why and the politics involved, having a coding assistant block on certain words, especially on common fields like gender, is going to disqualify it for many projects. The fact that a software project uses certain words, doesn't imply anything about the political views or potential abuse in that project. It could be that a project itself wants to censor the same words in content it handles, but now you can't use Copilot on that list. Or it might be a list of words the project wants to promote. You can't know. Making these sort of assumptions in a coding tool is a bad idea, no matter from which angle you look at it. But I'm not a huge fan of relying on online coding tools. Has anyone tried running Deepseek locally and use it for coding?
- woodrowbarlow 2y agosoo... maybe an easy way to avoid having copilot trained on my code is just to include a paragraph about trans rights in all my readme files. :)
- nerder92 2y agoThe real-word scenario that has happened to us was that it was completely misinterpreting words, for instance it stopped working because our file contained the word "retard", this was a localization file for the French translation where "retard" translate as "late", we needed to change the entire order of the file to avoid this problem and keep the auto-complete. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/79223 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/79223