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A comment on Google pulls gender pronouns from Gmail Smart Compose to reduce bias. Parent comment

Re:Google pulls gender pronouns from Gmail Smart Compose to ... by jkaplowitz on Tuesday November 27, 2018 @01:15PM (#18544957)
If the AI is telling you, "based on the statistics in the field, the odds of this person being a woman, a man, or a non-binary gender are X%, Y%, and Z% respectively," I agree there's no reason for offense.

But if the AI has no information about the email recipient's individual gender, it's much safer for the AI to use the default pronoun (singular they) that English already has where we don't want to assume the gender of a particular person, or else for it to avoid the use of a pronoun.

If a person who is not a man works in a male-dominated field and gets mislabeled as a man, it just makes them feel out of place and unwelcome. Doubly so if the AI-generated words are attributed to an individual colleague who knows their actual gender but doesn't fully edit the suggestion before sending.

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Re:Google pulls gender pronouns from Gmail Smart Compose to ... by vorticalbox on Tuesday November 27, 2018 @01:20PM (#18545015)
Except this isn't a person walking into a place and being mislabeled by another person.

it's a computer that has zero concept of gender.

I don't think that being mistake for a different sex is even cause to be offended.

That person doesn't know and can only go only by what they have seen before.

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Re:Google pulls gender pronouns from Gmail Smart Compose to ... by jkaplowitz on Tuesday November 27, 2018 @01:36PM (#18545200)
The mistake is being attributed to a human email sender as perceived by the email recipient, not to an AI, since it's an email suggestion. Many such email senders will know the recipient's gender better than the AI, and the recipient will know that.

As for your broader doubt that misgendering leads to offense, that's a longer conversation than I can shoehorn into this thread today, but the Geek Feminism wiki is one of several good places to which you can turn to start learning about that topic if you want to.

I'm a cisgender man myself, but I have heard enough personal stories from friends who aren't to know that misgendering can and often does offend.

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Re:Google pulls gender pronouns from Gmail Smart Compose to ... by EthanHeilman on Tuesday November 27, 2018 @01:33PM (#18545162)
Not sure why you are making this about "being offended" or not.

In some case a program makes mistakes --> a simple solution is implemented.

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