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Comment by 0x1221 | Hacker News Reader

> Given that a person’s gender cannot be inferred by appearance, we have decided to remove these labels in order to align with the Artificial Intelligence Principles at Google, specifically Principle #2: Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias.

Isn't this just outright wrong? A person's gender can be inferred by appearance, and with extremely high accuracy at that.

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While I tend to agree with you from a technical standpoint, I can't help but think Google is actually doing the morally correct thing here.

If organizations are creating systems using that API, most will just roll with man/woman labeling. If those systems are important, a lot of trans and non-binary people will end up fucked over.

At the end of the day, if the deprecated functionality is still needed, just set a threshold on masculine vs feminine. It's a far more elegant approach, even if more work.

Automatic gender detection should certainly not be used for data entry where the data is of any real consequence (even if we ignored trans/non-binary people), simply due to the fact that it can't be proven to be perfect.

I think yeah, it's easier to use masculine/feminine. Something like long hair, soft skin, pink cheeks, more curves is feminine. Someone with more squares/edges (jaw, cheeks, shoulders) is more masculine.

Humans have trouble with this too, e.g. many crushed on Taylor Hanson.

I always get it confused: is it sex or gender that people can assign to themselves?

Are you really confused about this, or just rhetorically confused? You can answer the question by googling "sex vs gender".

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