Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken | Hacker News Reader

Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

vice.com

622 pointssignor_bosco1,067 comments

I wonder if this is an example of not knowing your audience (or rather assuming one's self represents a wider audience than it does).

The people vouching for this at Google are likely product marketing managers, public relations folks, social media managers, etc. All they do is write corporate garbage all day, and much like we have "nit"s in PR's for formatting, variable names, etc; they likely have similar reviews that get flagged for "non-inclusive language" or whatever this is. So they have brilliant idea: the Code people use auto linters/formatters that we enable by default (hey gofmt) and everyone loves it, how about we do the same for the Prose people!

Basically: "All I write is corporate garbage, and all the writing I consume is corporate garbage, and all my coworkers only write corporate garbage, therefore everyone would love a corporate garbage-ifyer!"

This explanation rings a lot more true to me than the rest of this thread. Everyone here seems to be looking into shadows for the woke gestapo, when I'd be willing to bet that this explanation is a lot closer to how this tool actually came to exist.

I appreciate you adding to the conversation.

There's a market for 'help you write english better' tools that spot things like grammar errors.

For example, if my english-as-a-second-language eastern European subordinates feel self-conscious about their english, they might find an automated tool helpful - where a professional journalist would be better served by their own judgement.

The 'inclusive language' thing is just weird though.

Actually I've seen an English linter to help you maintain a passive voice for papers, remove waffle words and unnecessary fluff, etc. I'm not sure I can find the exact one I'm thinking of, but wasn't too bad overall, it spotted errors and made helpful suggestions. It was cool too, because it would read from stdin and integrated into vim pretty well with a few lines in my config.

Love it.

I do think there is more activism at play than you might. At a minimum it provides the fear mechanism that prevents employees from challenging the work, particularly if they aren't even on the project (why stick your neck out?).

However, the code format for prose analogy illuminates the writing quality angle brilliantly.

I'm sure I'm not alone in having distinct communication modes in work documents, each with their own reasons to be excluded from the ML dataset:

1. Keep it simple -- when achieved it is highly effective for communicating a work memo, but would be terribly dry if used in auto suggestions for an English major struggling through crafting moving prose.

2. Lazily verbose -- going long is more expedient than crafting a compact message. It's mostly unrefined garbage. (exhibit a this comment)

3. Everything is awesome (positivity inflation) -- a deluge of great, love, awesome, wonderful, perfect, etc. all applied to far too many things, far too often.

Imagine if an ML code formatter included psudeo code inputs, or was given a data set of every local file change (pre-commit) instead of what is sitting in a main branch? My Docs are filled with things that I'd never commit much less pass a code review.

If Google Docs was only used in corporate settings, and we wanted to double down on our drab corporate communication styles, I guess the feature would make some sense.

IMHO OK if the feature would actually provide explainations and it would be based on some sort of rulebook rather some random decision of individuals. I also would be fine if there is a warning if I use the word 'property owner' because some random internet user says that is deeply capitalistic. In the end I could decide if I want to follow the argument. Just nudging people to get away with a warning is bad and will lead to no warning. I doubt even that it will lead to a more inclusive world because no reflection is involved.

The problem for me is particularly that the combination of monopolies combined with AI that will learn from data largely filtered by those monopolies will generate some questionable gradients. So, yes, this might ultimately change language very quickly without much of human discourse over it. This will lead to language with less variation and arguably to a world that does not encourage variation and will be in effect less inclusive.

This kind of feature would be very handy for an email client. I don't think many emails are being sent out these days that aren't corporate garbage.

This actually…doesn’t not make sense

This comes off as an angry tirade full of projection and lacking any real insight.

I support it and I don’t work for google. I like this feature that encourages more empathy in this strife and hate filled world.

It’s also inaccurate to call this language “inclusive.” In reality, you’re excluding most Americans who aren’t among the handful of mostly affluent, white, college educated people who talk like this. My Bangladeshi immigrant mom would have no idea what to do if a warning popped up telling her that she should use a different word than “mother.”

It isn't colleges that advertise this exclusively, it is also corporate consulting like McKinsey. Know them? Allegedly the Robin Hood of the poor and disenfranchised.

The author of the article still sees it as a necessity. They cannot leave people talking like they want to.

Hear hear. Latinx, Filipinx - how dare the whites invent terminology to refer to disadvantaged minorities, using incorrect grammatical constructions or letters not even in the language of the people you refer to.

This is white cultural imperialism, full stop. Right or left, I don't care where it comes from - I know it when I smell it.

I know "it's literally 1984" [1] is a meme but c'mon... This is ridiculous even for Google. The systematic deconstruction and sanitation of language so that it conforms to a particular group's ideological leanings is unacceptable, especially in the hand's of a mega corporation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

Who better to do it?

no one? let the market decide.

I still wonder, how blacklist/whitelist or master/slave has helped or promoted slavery and racism.

And how many devs who are from black communities offended by the use of these terms, at least before it was made to be an issue in mainstream.

Because right now I feel like this is a "woke feminist" issue.

And I'm not a white person. I've never thought otherwise of these words, but maybe that can be because of the mixed society I grew up in.

The biggest annoyance for me is that the word/woke policing throws out the most important thing: context.

We don’t punish people for crimes until we’ve had a look at the context and establish their specific intention (Strict liability withstanding) so why are we not doing the same with words and sentences?

Master/slave debacle is a prime example. Yes it can be used offensively. But for gods sake, look at the context! Annoys me that with all the injustice still prevalent in the world, they choose to fight this instead.

/rant

That seems like an odd example. The "specific intention" of the word "slave" in computing is unquestionably to draw an analogy to slavery, so if somebody objects to the word on the grounds that it references an actual atrocity, they're factually correct.

I think what you're trying to say is that people don't mean to be offensive when they reference slavery this way. And you're right about that. Similarly, if I ask someone how their mom is right after she died, I'm probably not trying to be hurtful. But not intending an outcome doesn't actually prevent you from getting that outcome. If somebody tells you their mom is dead, and you didn't mean to be hurtful, you won't keep asking after her, because now you're aware of the effect it has.

Exactly, that's the big problem with so many of these ideas - they ignore common sense, making them look like tone-deaf measures created in bad faith. Which they probably are.

I feel you. This is my biggest critique of the so-called "woke" language. Perhaps their intentions are good, but I fail to see how hiding behind inclusive language does anything to change the reality of the lives of people they claim to be helping in the first place.

Calling a "landlord" a proprietor (example from the article) does nothing to change the actual dynamic between landlord and tenant. You have only changed the symbols you use without affecting any meaningful change in the world. Maybe a devil's advocate would say, "Symbols evoke feelings evoke action and thus we are affecting people's actions". That's the strongest counter-argument I can think of, and it's not very convincing either. Not sure how a landlord would suddenly change how they act because they are now proprietors.

Yep, I had struggled down these lines too but the always lucid John McWhorter cleared things up for me, and as a linguist it's right up his alley.

"On metaphor, master is a useful example. The basic concept of the master as a leader or person of authority has extended into a great many metaphorical usages. One of them was its use as a title on plantations worked by slaves...That makes sensible the elimination of certain other uses of the word, which parallel and summon the slavery one...in the 1970s, such schools had just begun a call to stop having male teachers called "master" and female teachers called "teacher," in favor of having all instructors called simply "teacher"...This meant that young subordinates had been calling white men in positions of authority "master," after all—including, by the 1970s, more than a few black students. And today's call to stop referring to technology parts as "master" versus "slave" attachments follows in the same vein, as it directly channels what was so offensive about the slavery usage...However, other extensions of the word master do not meaningfully resemble the plantation one, and only a kind of obsession could explain spraying for them now. Are we to consider it racist to refer simply to mastering a skill? To master tape as opposed to dupes...The plantation meaning of master was one tributary of a delta of extensions of the word; it should go, but we need not fill in the entire delta."

And for emphasis I'm pulling this one out of the main block:

** "To be human is to make distinctions." **

https://reason.com/2020/08/12/is-your-master-bedroom-racist/

Probably severe nepotism with industry consulting or someone has some idealistic child in colleague and their guilt about neglected parenting made them force the issue as it has been adopted in some parts of the industry. At least official, never seen anyone use different terms by now and I don't even know the substitute. It is always something like this. But yeah, they certainly are white as the snow, so much is sure.

I spent many years in the bluest corner of a very blue state. But still I can't imagine any objection to the word "landlord" outside of (1) a right wing attempt to satirize the left, (2) a Google product brainstorming meeting, or (3) a rare sincere outlier or concern troll. In any of those cases I don't think this is necessary.

That said, if the word "landlord" organically fell out of favor and out of usage to be replaced by something else I wouldn't care. Language is always evolving, and usually we don't make a big deal out of it. It's mundane and can often be helpful. It doesn't have to become a proxy for culture war arguments if we don't make it one.

But to have Google (or any AI) in charge of this... just... no. Admittedly that's a common stance for me but I think it's well justified here anyway.

Landlord gets hit from multiple sides; those who don't like that it contains "lord" which is a male term, those who don't like that landlords exist, and those who don't like that the concept of owning land exists.

Sure the origin is to do with Lords but landlord isn't male, anyone can be a landlord, pretending it's gendered is just lying to try and be offended. Presumably, such people think the word coward references bovines as it includes the word cow.

I don't like that landlords exist, but that's an inordinately stupid reason to try and get rid of a word. Surely noone believes that by sensoring a word you get rid of that which the word describes.

> those who don't like that the concept of owning land exists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxRkHeQ7-B8

A caveat of bending over backwards to be as inclusive as possible is that sometimes you end up including people who are just plain nuts. You end up enshrining the personal problems of a handful of people into company policy.

It’s just a modern word. “Landlord”. People know what it means. Stop anybody on the street and ask them what a landlord is? They will tell you. It’s an established word. What’s the point in changing it because a few people actively want to be offended?

> (1) a right wing attempt to satirize the left

It's hard not to secretly suspect that some of these things arise that way-- satire that is so spot on that it gets adopted as the truth.

> and out of usage to be replaced by something else I wouldn't care

Fundamentally that's why language bullying works-- it doesn't matter what words are used so long as the communicating parties understand each other. Not only does it mean that it's not worth it to fight back, it makes anyone who does fight back against it look automatically suspect.

The same is true for a lot of other bullying: ignoring that its bullying deprives it of its power. Or, at least, it denies it of it's power until it doesn't.

But do we want to live in a world where our language is constantly being rewritten-- at a non-zero cost-- by bullies (and their automation)? Reasonable people could debate it.

Right. Arguments against “landlord,” “mother/father,” etc simply reek of concern trolling.

It’s not “landlord”. It’s “person who lords land”.

Have you seen the people objecting to the term "Master Recording" and such.

What if your 3) was in 2) pushing 1) only it backfired and people in 2) took it seriously?

The change from “landlord” feels good. I’ve always felt a little awkward when using the word but couldn’t articulate why.

Google wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’s nice that someone is able to dedicate attention to this.

This link in the article is insanely, crazily, madly, insultingly sickening to anyone who's not a slave. As I read it I felt like it was some kind of parody of Orwell. Disgusting to tell someone what verbiage they use sincerely and in technical terms is now verboten because it's harmful. To whom? Crazy people?

https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation

Geez, that word list.

Here’s an idea. American Big Tech should form a Uniban Consortium to streamline the process of adding and banning new harmful words of the month. Then your OS update could come with support for, say, Unicode 20.0 and Uniban 6.0: five new emojis and fifty new words banned!

Btw, the word main should probably be put on a future batch; too similar to “man” to be comfortable.

This guide is interesting in how it lists allegedly immoral language use, alongside with clear PR/legal/trademark directives which I don't give a fuck about, such as "don't use google as a verb". I'll google whatever I want, google PR, go suck an egg.

Also quite annoying how they simply tell us what to do, without justifying things. A lot of these would be quite hard to truly argue - i.e. "blind people... can't see things. why exactly is that metaphor inappropriate to talk about visibility?" So they just assume an authoritarian tone and just instruct us in how we should behave.

I don't think it's the worst thing to encourage people too be thoughtful about their word choice. Is it really "crazy", or are you selling an emotional reaction by personifying your topic as a mentally deranged person? I actually think steering clear of this language is helpful in defusing the outrage culture that is so harmful to our online discourse.

The most hilarious thing about this is that Google has used "AI" to create the most un-inclusive tool of all, Google Translate.

I present you the beautiful translation of hungarian gender-less sentences to english:

ő csinos. ő okos. ő csúnya. ő jó.

becomes

she is pretty. he is clever. she is ugly. he is good.

I can't wait for inclusive warnings to come to non-english languages.

While it's hilarious, it's understandable IMHO - just basic statistics, she is more often used in front of pretty/ugly. It's showing a glitch in our society more than a glitch in Google AI.

This on the other hand looks like a hand-crafted blacklist of words that they want to remove from the language, I have no idea how would I train an AI which would classify "motherboard" as inappropriate.

That's nothing

Ő jóképű

Becomes, wait for it

She is handsome

Just like in English, handsome is used to compliment a man, and pretty to compliment a woman.

if only English had a gender neutral pronoun that could be used by default when the gender of the subject isn't provided :thinking:

It's computer-brain solution to a problem that is crying out for a human. Humans "don't scale". Therefore paying 5 bi-lingual experts to teach the machine is "infeasible", but spending millions upon millions of dollars on hardware and software development, then exposing it the unwashed mess of the internet isn't....

Recent and related:

Google Docs will “warn you away from inappropriate words” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31086310 - April 2022 (964 comments)

The older I get, the more I fail to understand how the vocal minority is able to completely control the narrative on everything.

While we’re at it, let’s just gut the English language of anything remotely related to gender, race, or color. Then we can go after Latin-based languages that use gender at the core of their grammar.

Weird. The older I get the more understandable it becomes to me. None of this crap matters. At most it matters because it enables bullying, but bullies are always going to find something to bully over.

"Good job, you won, you made me stop using a perfectly fine word that was uniformly well understood, and replace it with another perfectly fine word that is also uniformly well understood. Nothing changed, but now at least you get to take credit for it. Good for you."

Irrelevant nitpick: "gender" in linguistics means "category". Objects in grammatically gendered languages are rarely/never categorized as "manly" or "effeminate"; they're, for example, categorized as "animate" or "inanimate". [1]

[1] https://blog.duolingo.com/what-is-grammatical-gender/

I’m just gonna leave this here:

https://i.redd.it/wqld5v9s5ln81.jpg

In the article they use the example of "Motherboard" and "Landlord" and seem to suggest that these are areas where the Google AI is making mistakes or being overly strict.

As a Google employee expressing my own opinion and observations of company culture, I can say that these are 100% not mistakes. Many Google employees are just so out of touch with the real world that they believe it is the duty of Google Docs to change the English language to exclude the words "landlord", "motherboard", and even "mother" in most contexts (sub with birthing person).

This may seem unbelievable, but the word "motherboard" is literally banned within Google and you are required to use "mainboard" instead. You are not allowed to use this word in documentation or code, and you're also not allowed to say it privately in chats or emails.

As someone who also works at Google, I agree that there is a vocal minority who want Google to be a promoter of progressive values, but: I think you nay be exaggerating things here.

I've never even heard of any controversy over the word "motherboard". I just did some internal searches. It seems to be a well-used word, both in code and in documentation. (I did a code search for both "motherboard" and "mainboard" and they seem to be used by similar amounts, fwiw.)

In fairness, I will say that I do watch my language more closely than I think is really needed:

The terms "whitelist" and "blacklist" are built into my thought-vocabulary. I do find myself switching to "allowlist" and "denylist" as I translate my thoughts in discussions. Not that anyone has ever "called me out" if I slipped up with "whitelist".

If we're going to play this game, I think dissuading people from using "mother" in the example of "motherboard" is offensive. Mothers are the source of human life on earth, and in that capacity are revered and honored. When we say motherboard, we're making an analogy that suggests the board's significance and universal connection to everything.

To discourage the term as an analogy for things that are a universal source is to demote women and their role as mothers.

I'd like to know who at Google puts these lists together and what judge decreed their viewpoint on this more valid than mine or anyone else's, since apparently Google feels that from this judgement they have the right to shape speech for millions of people and therefore, by extension, our culture.

"Motherboard" is particularly unbelievable. The motherboard runs the machine. It's a woman in a position of power. Isn't that what everyone says they want?

Or is the idea to just erase the very concept of gender from the world? Welcome to OkCupid, I am a [PERSON] seeking [PERSON]

I want out of this timeline

I am incredulous at the "mother" to "birthing person" requirement. I have seen one or two people with such prescriptive views on language but the vast majority of people I know consider it ridiculous. And I am in an incredibly "woke" social bubble.

This attempt at "de-offensive-izing" all language has the effect of turning clear, evocative phrases to mush.

George Carlin's skit couldn't be more timely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isMm2vF4uFs

This entire comment is a lie. Terms like "motherboard" are readily findable on Google's internal search. I could not find anything referencing a banned non-inclusive words policy in the employee policy guide. I have never heard of anything remotely resembling someone catching heat for saying "motherboard" or whatever.

Source: I also work at Google.

This is why I’m pessimistic about the West winning the second cold war. While Chinese engineers are working hard on world dominating AI models and other hard tech, Western engineers are wasting man hours on crap like this.

I can believe this. Around the time I left people were patting backs for fighting racism by getting rid of terms blacklist/whitelist.

Not something I feel super strongly about, but the fact that it's so scary to go against these stupid ideas is annoying. It's pure politics, there's nobody benefiting from this except the people claiming impact for antiracist work in their perf.

Reminds me of when GitHub stopped using "master" for the default branch because it was somehow offensive.

>Many Google employees are just so out of touch with the real world that they believe it is the duty of Google Docs to change the English language to exclude the words "landlord", "motherboard", and even "mother" in most contexts (sub with birthing person).

It's frantic activity to avoid looking in the mirror. Making themselves busy fixing something massive and intractable to avoid having to think about the actionable items closer to home.

A worse one is to me is that they aren't allowed to say "Quantum Supremacy", because it reminds some people of "White Supremacy"? Nevermind that you actually give that concept more power when you make it so that even discussing it or inadvertently bring it up is stigmatized. Things are starting to get kind of Orwellian.

On landlord I can’t think of a proper synonym. Property owner and proprietor are broader categories of what a landlord is. They don’t mean the person you’re paying rent to for your housing.

I had mentioned this in the previous post about this topic[1], yet some people casually discredit it as nothing. The slippery slope is real folks

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31086310&p=3#31087238

> This may seem unbelievable, but the word "motherboard" is literally banned within Google and you are required to use "mainboard" instead. You are not allowed to use this word in documentation or code, and you're also not allowed to say it privately in chats or emails.

Is this really true? I always thought I might eventually apply to work at Google someday, but I hadn't heard there was such aggressive internal thought policing.

Sounds like woke gibberish. I suppose we can take some solace in the fact that they haven't renamed "motherboard" as "birthing-person-board."

Genuinely curious: what do you do internally for "male" and "female" connectors?

This is the company that fired James damore and then turned around and spouted his talking points a few months later not even realising the hypocrisy.

https://mashable.com/article/google-youtube-women-in-tech-di...

>sub with birthing person

eww. This has the same vibes as someone saying "I want to breed with them". Like sure, it's grammatically correct, but you're gonna come off as a creep at best and some weird fetishist at worst.

You have got to be kidding. Was this some retaliatory complaint by some dude showing dudes can be triggered by female-emphasizing phrases as well?

Should it have been renamed to birthing-person-board? What a joke

Not trying to troll here...but are there people advocating that we replace "Mother's Day" with "Birthing Person's Day"? If a person gave birth who no longer identifies as a woman is it not inclusive to gender the holiday as we do?

> you're also not allowed to say it privately in chats or emails

In this context, what does it mean? For the other stuff, it is easily envisioned that it means official documents need to be scanned for prohibited terms. Ultimately, the term "motherboard" has to at least appear in an official document of banned words. In private chats, do they rely on the other party to turn you in? Is it automatically detected? Are you prevented from actually typing it? Can you post this link [1]?

[1] - https://www.newegg.com/Motherboards/Category/ID-20

Woke Clippy (to borrow from up-thread) is going to have a field day when it learns German. There. Are. So. Many. Violations.

Can someone reasonably explain to me why mother or motherboard is offensive...at all?

I try to be somewhat reasonable. I can stretch my mind enough to see the complaint with blacklist at least. But mother being offensive...my mind isn't able to stretch that far unless I'm missing something.

Okay, for a moment, forget about your position or feelings about the issue. Would you say that these restrictions or changes actually changed anything for better or worse? Is there some kind of evaluation going on to track the results of these policies?

So... essentially you have to go around hoops in the way you communicate internally? LEL.

I can't imagine most employees agree with this. Why aren't they pushing back?

How about "motherboard/fatherboard"? If we just use that everywhere they'll all be happy. No fatherboards will feel left out. Mother-of-pearl can just be nacre, and I don't know what you'll have to call mother-of-vinegar. Maybe just say it's something special and not to think too much about how fermentation works - especially if it causes you to have evil, non-inclusive thoughts.

If I'm writing about a ship and refer to it as a "she", does that set off the autoinquisitor?

When the same kind of people banned "master" branch for being offensive I was surprised. Not so much now if I think in their logic

As someone fairly familiar with the SJWs in a variety of FANGs, motherboard/mainboard doesn't even offend me any more. I kind of get it, even though it is lame logic.

I'm waiting until they start marking "Latino" as non-inclusive, and start forcing "Latinx".

This sounds entirely fabricated. I've been in the hardware department for more than 10 years. Maybe you put a word in a list. I've never even heard of someone considering this.

Is there at least some sort of mailing list you can subscribe to to know which phrases are verboten this week?

This may seem unbelievable, but the word "motherboard" is literally banned within Google and you are required to use "mainboard" instead

No more "motherboard" and "daughterboard?" Sounds like Google has found yet another way to marginalize women.

Pay 'em less. Then pretend they don't exist.

Way to go, Diversity Champions!

That's part of Marxist long march through institutions. They achieve these goals through bullying and accusations. Nobody at work wants to be (unfoundedly) accused of racism so they silently accept these new rules. I mean it's a small inconvenience that is probably worth the salary they are getting. But the truth is people in these organisations are afraid of speaking their minds in case they say something that is deemed wrong by woke police. I noticed that people have become less open and many limits conversations strictly to the tasks at hand. It's kind of how corporate goals meet with Marxism - they believe people no longer engage in "pointless" socialising that affects the bottom line and if they want to engage, they have a minefield to navigate. Many of my (former) friends who worked at these big corporations have become zombies - it's not possible to have a conversation with them about day to day life, events etc. It's really fascinating and worrying.

Out of couriosity: Why then didn't flag it the actual n-word of all things?

> A transcribed interview of neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke—in which he uses the N-word and talks about hunting Black people—gets no notes.

Edit: Also interesting that this comment is dropping like a stone in HN's comment ranking, even though currently the comment score is at 1. If I accidentally triggered some anti-flame or anti-profanity filter, I'm sorry.

I wouldn't mind calling Motherboard site to Personboard... ehhehehe

It would be interesting to call landlord as landperson.

Thanks - this gave me the kick in the ass to switch from Gmail to FastMail.

Post a screenshot, otherwise I agree with others that you're just lying.

Google is a large corporation. Large corporations will often enact arcane rulesets to give HR ways to manipulate their labor costs. This really sounds a lot like why this type of approach would be supported.

> Many Google employees are just so out of touch with the real world

This isn't remotely limited to Google. My company does this too. I've heard of others making similar changes.

Are these kinds of arbitrary changes to language usage silly and pointless? Maybe. But tough love here: languages change in arbitrary and pointless ways constantly. They always have. They always will. Your own common usages and idioms would seem outrageously weird to your grandparents. People had these same fights in the 60's, also 80's, and 50's... The 40's too now that I think of it...

To wit: we aren't getting oppressed here, we're just getting old. And the attempt to turn it into a political fight (on both sides) is largely just a reaction to the friction. It's not the cause.

I mean, really. Is "mainboard" such a hardship? It's not even a new word, it's two bytes and one syllable shorter. Must this be a fight?

So much of this technology perpetuates the biases they're intended to fix.

We put some of our job postings through one of these, and it flagged too many 'masculine' words, like 'analyze', 'leadership', and 'data'. Sorry women, time get back in the kitchen and nurture.

Got a source for that? Or an/the online tool you used? I'd love to try it

I was extended an on-site interview at Google and after reading this and the comments I think I'll pass.

If you can (i.e. you don't fear persecution), please let them know that this was the reason.

Part of the reason these things have taken off is that their proponents are very vocal, while the opponents prefer to just mind their own business.

This particular feature is indeed half-baked and dumb, but FWIW, much of what I've seen claimed in the comments is outright false.

If you know anyone within Google, I suggest privately asking their experiences, rather than sampling only those people who are mad about Google on HN.

I dislike this proposed feature as much as the next person, but it's worth noting that the main complaint of this article is fairly unique: they work on a channel called Motherboard, and this feature is going to cause the name of their channel to be considered a problem. Most people won't experience that specific error case. It's valid, and points to the kinds of unforeseen consequences you run into when trying to manage speech in this way, but it's not by itself a smoking gun for most people.

Ok, but it makes no sense in the first place? “Motherboard” has long been a technical computer term, that even somebody with a passive interest in computers would understand. You would have to make an effort to be offended by it in some way.

I fail to understand what’s going on these days. Words change their meaning over decades. A small minority seem hellbent on kicking up a storm to change popular usage, where no offense or other meaning is implied in general modern usage.

Considering the word “mother” - a concept that is about as universally understood across the whole of humanity as it is possible for a concept to be - “problematic“ is itself a sign that this movement has gone off the deep end.

It doesn't even make sense that an AI model trained on normal writing samples would flag that as problematic, since it is not considered so by the vast majority of people. Unless the model was trained exclusively on the most extreme Tumblr posts, it suggests that fringe Google employees are injecting their personal ideology into the products.

The vast, vast majority of people do not want their mothers erased from the language.

It's not valid to censor the word "mother". It's either laughable or sinister, depending on whether the people trying to do it actually have power.

I think this article hints at an important thing though which is that language is contextual. Even if we think that we should describe mothers as birthing persons or fathers as non-birthing parents in the general context, I should be allowed to refer to myself as a father. People of color can re-claim slurs, which a correction to could probably feel paternalistic. There are lots of contexts where certain language is ok, depending on the speaker or the audience. And I guess it means you're not supposed to use google docs for any kind of emotional writing, as it tries to correct "annoyed" or the f word. That and there is this beauty:

> A transcribed interview of neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke—in which he uses the N-word and talks about hunting Black people—gets no notes. Radical feminist Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto gets more edits than Duke’s tirade; she should use “police officers” instead of “policemen,”

and as we can see, large numbers of people- there are hundreds of us- think that the name of that channel to be highly offensive. Actually, no, wait, nobody actually finds it offensive.

Trying to flatten everything into synonyms is the same reason Google search has gone downhill. Now they’re bringing that same feature nobody asked for into Google docs. Language is too complex for any algorithm to “understand”

We haven't gotten spelling assistance right, let alone grammar or semantics. Prefer editors with fewer "smart" features that distract from writing.

> We haven't gotten spelling assistance right

Shouldn't you say that we got spelling assistance correct instead of right? Left-handed people might not like to see the word "right" being used to mean "correct"

What i don't understand is how they can roll out this feature, while the last few weeks I've suddenly started getting spammed in Google Drive with obscene garbage that can only be blocked on an instance by instance basis. Surely they could offer some gate that allows the user to deploy such filters where they actually want them?

That's peak Google right there. It's the infection point on their organic growth. They've got a long tail of incumbency and subsidized dominance ahead of them, but in the lifecycle of a company, this is the out of touch moment that demonstrates they've passed their middle age. In terms of half life, this suggests they've got another decade of some vitality, and then a kind of legacy presence in the decade after that before their furniture gets picked up by something newer in a growth phase.

They would be well served to update their motto to, "Don't be fatuous." It's the best they can do now.

I have been thinking about this for a while, and came to the conclusion that the main weakness of progressivism is its arrogance. A progressive simply thinks that she is more educated, virtuous or simply better than others. This manifests subtly, from "helping poor immigrants", to not so subtle implementations, like knowing better what Google queries you actually meant to type, to censoring "fake news", because people do not have the faculty to decide for themselves, to downright auto-correction of people's speech. A progressive copes with this implied superiority by casting it as her goodness.

One of the best films on this subject is Dogville by Lars von Trier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogville , with Grace as its main character.

My take on the situation is that as a movement and political ideology "Progressivism" is steeped in a sense of righteousness. I very much sense progressives have internalized the notion that what they are fighting for is so obviously good, correct, and just that anyone who opposes such self-evidently virtuous things must either be 1) brainwashed by malevolent forces (Fox news, misinformation, propaganda, internalized oppression) or 2) constitutionally flawed people who cannot be redeemed and must be fought against ("Deplorables", fascists, nazis, racists, etc).

You are lumping all progressive people together.

You also assume they are female.

Why?

Microsoft is in the process of rolling 'inclusive' checking out, in (at least) the web version of Outlook 365. You can see by clicking the gear icon (in top right) -> View all Outlook settings (at bottom) -> Compose and reply -> Microsoft Editor settings (bottom). It is 'very broken'.

Somewhere I wonder if people have read too much of Orwell's 1984 and Iain M. Banks Culture series and have decided that between Newspeak and Marain is an idea that whilst we may not better the world today, if we can obliterate language we can obliterate an idea.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis put to use as a tool to ensure that future generations of humans will avoid the problems that have plagued us for all time, because the ideas that perpetuate those issues will have been eradicated.

I'm left in awe at the audacity of it, the idea that human nature itself can be changed just by striking out words from the language. Seems implausibly naive and paternalistic.

>we can obliterate language we can obliterate an idea.

This is effectively one of the tenets of postmodernist thought. That language shapes reality. There is truth in the idea that language can influence perception but that doesn't mean that negative ideas can be eliminated by merely controlling language...

Virtue signaling is a hell of a drug.

I tried to explain to someone online that the word black has many meanings, not every use of black is about people. Oh man, in the end I was "taught" that just by not accepting his ideas I was a racist person.

My experience with this type of person is very bad. They are ignorant people, defending points without understanding the points. They are very aggressive and work in packs.

Today I try not to work or talk to this type of person/company.

You mean to tell me that all this time black people were the reason the black plague, black mambas, and blacktop exist?

When I first met the D&D alignment chart, it was enlightening. It can explain a situation like this so easily - namely, that the person you met is a lawful evil type. Like a concern troll on the internet, bad intentions are hidden behind a legal, orderly facade.

I don't think these types should discredit the movement. I do wish they wouldn't rile up folk so much though. Change is hard as it is, it's very unhelpful for the cause that they behave in such a bad way.

>Oh man, in the end I was "taught" that just by not accepting his ideas I was a racist person.

All the hallmarks of a cult. Commit heresy and get excommunicated.

This is straight out of Brave New World where the word "mother" was viewed as obscene.

Check out this video uploaded just recently: [Health department refuses to define ‘woman’ in Senate Estimates](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX_1QNXgjDM). Australia's own health department struggle and eventually refuse to answer the simple question. Look at how uncomfortable they are with such an innocuous request.

On similar trends, we are seeing institutions such as the ACLU post tweets like this: https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1439259891064004610?s=20 . It's a tweet of a quote by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But the ACLU has decided to replace the word "women" with "people".

So yes, we are moving into a brave new world.

The word “mother” is already considered obscene because it is not inclusive of uh “men who give birth”.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-budget-proposa...

This topic is always going to be highly subjective, but I find the author's examples of how this feature is malfunctioning to be extremely uncompelling.

"Motherboard" was included in Apple's style guide in 2020 as "don't use" (https://help.apple.com/applestyleguide/#/apsg72b28652). Like it or hate it, this is the direction the industry, of which Google is a part, is moving. I'm sure a publication called Motherboard might have an opinion on this, but neither they nor Google are the final arbiters on the language. The I Have a Dream speech example is pretty anecdotal; King was an excellent writer, and I don't think Google is claiming this tool would make a person write like King. And the substitution suggestion in Kennedy's speech is just the way the language use has trended since his time... One can note that the Star Trek franchise changed the saying from "Where no man has gone before" to "Where no-one has gone before" in the time between then and now, as well. The Bible is probably the worst example to pull up for this topic; paging through the over 20 translations on biblegateway.com shows the passage in question is also sometimes translated as "great works", "mighty works", or just "miracles." Which should you use? It depends completely on what you're doing.

Of everything noted, the only possibly concerning one is really the lack of suggestions on a David Duke interview. If I had to guess, I'd chalk that up to lack of training data, and it may be something Google wants to consider addressing.

But at the end of the day, the overall thesis of the report is flawed. "But words do mean things," says the author. Yes, they do. Which is why it could be nice to have an auto-editor lifting up examples of words that might mean something other than the author intended (and then the author can choose to change their phrasing or stick with the original). Nothing about this feature claims to make users magically better at writing; it's an assistive tool to open the possibility, not unlike a spell-checker.

We've had Microsoft Word grammar checker for literal decades. This technology is neither particularly new nor, IMHO, particularly interesting (certainly not interesting enough to kick up this news cycle). It's no more 1984 than some random stranger online offering an opinion on your verbage is 1984.

This is why I'm quite bullish the technocrats will fail miserably in their move to homogenize the planet into some freakish, Jim Jones beehive.

Question for those in the Beta trial:

Can you disable this feature globally for your account, or do you need to disable this in every document explicitly?

"...language is of central importance to human thought because it structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing."

That idea is also known as the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, and despite many attempts, it has never been proven. There are only a few flawed papers that provide some support. We can safely assume it's untrue. Instead, it's (trivially) the other way around: our thinking shapes our language.

Thus further evidence of neurolinguistic programming being real (or people believing it’s real).

Shape the language people are allowed to use and you start to shape their thoughts as well.

The good news is that those who are against this stuff may be pleased to know you're not alone --- roughly half of the Americans on one side of the political spectrum would agree with you.

The bad news is that Google and seemingly the rest of Big Tech are all sitting solidly on one side, and amongst all this "diversity and inclusion" talk, there is basically no thought given about diversity and inclusion of the political kind. Given the power that Google has over "speech", perhaps some sort of equality of political representation "affirmative action" needs to happen to it too?

Google is a private entity. In the opinion of the economic right, wouldn't companies be free to make their own rules about their own conduct?

Big tech is not how you're painting it. I think it sits solidly where it can keep its income growing. They'd like to operate in China, so they apply filters to search results, or use their servers instead of the default. Pride month sees avatars changing to a colorful, but only in the more permissive locations. Business is, in part, about getting along, and inclusivity is currently how you get along in the West - nothing more, nothing less.

It's likely more than just half. Over on the non-performative left side this would just get used as another example of companies trying to win woke points instead of doing anything materially beneficial in late stage capitalism, and that the hogs will eat up their slop.

I can't even properly describe how angry this makes me.

We suggest you replace the word angry with pleased.

Imagine the life of someone who thinks that this is a good and important change. It's probably miserable-- a slight around every corner and no higher purpose than bulling people over terminology. Instead of anger, try gratitude that you're not in their shoes.

What a giant waste of human intelligence and engineering effort.

The comments have been really interesting to read here. On the one hand, I am relieved to see the number of other people who see a lot of this as silly at best, and dystopian at worst, like I do. On the other hand I see a lot of parallels with Paul Graham's recent post on heresy[1]. It seems like many people here want to be free to dissent without repercussions, but when reading thru the comments on the Heresy piece, it seemed like many people were very dismissive of the piece because they couldn't get over Paul not specifically naming a heresy. Isn't speaking out against this language erasure a heresy because of the fear of being cancelled?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30977147

It’s no wonder they fired the AI ethics department if this is the output.

And now the rest of the world will be very happy learn that they will once more have to silently deal with the aftermath of America’s latest political trend.

After banning world-famous paintings from Facebook because they dared show a breast, a few well-off engineers and product managers will now pick which English words should remain, and which should be let go.

How nice of them. Don’t know what we’d do without them.

It probably won't make you feel any better, but even in America, there is a feeling of SV is shoving its political trends down our collective throat.

Supposedly they hate imperialism.

This isn't unique to SV. There are plenty of examples of words and behaviours that were commonplace and then over time evolved to be unacceptable to use in polite company.

I'd like to give some examples, but I fear I'd end up swiftly banned for even using some of the best examples.

One interesting case is "idiots, imbeciles and morons" - once technical terms to describe a mental health scale. The 'most insulting' end of the scale is now probably the most acceptable word to use in public!

This SV culture is being exported to the rest of the world at an alarming pace.

https://www.economist.com/international/2021/06/12/social-me...

Yeah but they have absolute freedom of speech so they're better than us /s

>banning world-famous paintings from Facebook because they dared show a breast

Issues with breasts aren't exactly a new thing in the US, just ask Janet Jackson.

The intentions of these features aside which will no doubt be the topic of conversation, to me the biggest takeaway about this is just how entirely stupid AI still is. Failing to recognize context, wordplay, even names (suggesting alternatives to Motherboard), and so forth. Trying to adjust something as complex as 'inclusivity' by flipping words is like trying to change the tone of a poem by flipping individual letters. Entirely wrong level of abstraction.

As long as I can turn it off can't say I care much. Google can tut at me all it wants, but at the end of the day I'm still going to ignore them.

I don't believe this has anything to do with AI, it most likely is rule based (not the entire system, just inclusive warnings). People like to shit on AI, but AI wouldn't really make such ridiculous suggestions, only human can.

The suggestions look a lot like code linters in FAANG companies. People from the outside will be shocked at some of these "inclusive" linters if they take a look.

> Cutting phrases like “whitelist/blacklist” and “master/slave” out of our vocabulary not only addresses years of habitual bias in tech terminology, but forces us as writers and researchers to be more creative with the way we describe things.

> calling landlords “property owners” is almost worse than calling them “landchads,” and half as accurate. It’s catering to people like Howard Schultz who would prefer you not call him a billionaire, but a “person of means.”

"I like the tool because it removes others' words that I don't like but I don't like the tool because it removes my words that others don't like"

I think you're misreading. Nowhere in the article did the author say she "liked the tool" for removing whitelist/blacklist.

Why not use proprietor?

I suppose the fear is that Google will add this to search and penalize sites that have words that are flagged.

What I can see is that on Google own websites, the term motherboard is used aplenty so seems to me they fail their own standards, if what is described in the article is accurate. Wondering when humanity will become aware of the ridiculous path this whole thing is.

Examples: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/the-past-presen... https://sustainability.google/progress/projects/circular-eco...

Gosh that wokeness is getting more insane the day.

Reading this I don't get quite the same reaction as everyone else. I think this is actually a useful tool. However the main failing is that there is one global ruleset decided by Google. If this was customizable by each organization or department it could actually have value. I don't think shaping the way your company communicates is much of a problem, the problem arises when Google shapes how your company (and individual users speak). It would also be interesting if these different models could be published and shared.

Basically I think the core idea is fine. But applying the same model globally was a clear mistake.

I caught "inclusive" in the list of things Gmail will "suggest" "better" words in Google Docs. The scary part of this that this enables enforcement. That may seem far fetched now, but in the future?

The pendulum is swinging back and force once a decade or so. Just give it a few years to calm down a bit and we'll go back to worrying about putting leaves on David and painting over renaissance paintings.

Humans act so weird in large groups.

Can it be turned off?

On that note - HN hive mind: Can the current Grammar/Spell checking be turned off?

I am a victim of Google Docs. Must be used at work. I hate the slow opinionated clunky thing, but turning off the "features" would be helpful.

> suggested he change it to “angry” or “upset” to “make your writing flow better.”

Nope, it suggested to change from this to that so the writer could be Google's avatar on writing what Google wants to get written

I mean, this is the way of things. Corporate slacks have bots to correct non-inclusive language, and enforce syntax changes like whitelist --> allowlist, master --> main, etc. IMO it's silly, but nevertheless increasingly ingrained in corporate America. For the many of us that use G Suite for work, this feels like a natural extension of other areas to remind us to use current language. It's potentially a helpful reminder that avoids the awkwardness of someone actually making a gdocs comment about it.

I mean I do all those substitutions not because of some weird sense of moral superiority but it’s literally a zero effort thing that might do some good and in most cases improves clarity, especially for non-native speakers.

Their spell check is very broken too. My company is called 'CorrectHorseBatteryStapleXYZCorporation' and it didn't think I'd spelled that correctly! As if I'd spell my own company name wrong.

It's almost like it's just some basic pattern matching software they're using to help catch and highlight common mistakes when reviewing text at the risk of false positives rather than waiting until they have a fully sentient god-level AI that knows everything.

Have there ever been any studies that show that using the masculine pronoun in the neuter reference in English, impacts (or has ever impacted) the well-being of females?

Until a couple decades ago it was well understood that in English the "masculine" was gender-neutral and the "feminine" was an honorific. Hence why esteemed possessions, countries, etc. were referred to in the feminine. Is it possible that taking away that honorific from women has harmed their sense of self-worth or some other aspect of their well-being?

Google has flown completely off the rails. I don't know why shareholders aren't stepping in, but if they don't I will be stepping away from google.

This part of the culture is in the grip of a mania. Mania is like improperly overclocked insight. Turn the zeal dial too high, and out comes confusion.

> Social editor Emily Lipstein typed “Motherboard” (as in, the name of this website) into a document and Google popped up to tell her she was being insensitive: “Inclusive warning. Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers. Consider using different words.”

If blacklist is considered non-inclusive language, why isn’t motherboard? Motherboard is a needlessly gendered term that perpetuates stereotypes.

> needlessly gendered term that perpetuates stereotypes.

The stereotype that mothers... are... computer parts...? I don't get it, what's the stereotype?

Time to make those on-site interviews more rigorous. Looks like too many bad coders are leaking through the interview process.

Oh, its not about good coders. It's about who they select. Companies now explicitly ask DIE (diversity, equity & inclusion) questions. Its the new filter to select those that follow this new orthodoxy.

Am I the only one starting to get a little worried what will happen when the pendulum inevitably swings the other way?

Isn't this already happening with the don't say gay people?

We've gotten to the point where we think that not one person should be even mildly bothered by what we say.

This has been going on since the 70s. Chairperson, postal worker, archer, flight attendant all came from then.

“Flight attendant” is outdated. The modern accepted term is “trolley dolly”.

Mother board -> Birthing person board

In a dystopian future you'll have a score indicating how often the algo had caught your wrong-speak.

> [..] typed “annoyed” and Google suggested he change it to “angry” or “upset” to “make your writing flow better.”

Why would their algorithm do this?

Like, whether that's a bug or intended, how could their algorithm have ended up suggesting that "annoyed" was non-inclusive?

The same logic that got rid of the master branch applies to motherboard.

And much of this logic ignores context.

I'm waiting for the moment when the woke realise that everything they despise revolves around christianity in one way or another, and for this reason they'll proudly declare themselves as not only anti-racist, but also anti-christian.

I'm going to delete my Google account today. I'd rather watch YouTube without ads, but I can take a little brainwashing for some praxis. Corporations only speak the language of money, outrage and morals are foreign to them.

Come on over to Onlyoffice, they have an online office offering and no inclusive suggestions.

Controversial suggestion but can the California folks just do their own bay area version of products?

The rest of us around the world never asked for any of this weirdness

Will it suggest "peace be upon him" in Islamic countries next? If not, why not? At least that's an actual religion unlike whatever this weirdness is.

How is it inclusive to export this thinking to places that don't want it? Words are really just words. I never enslaved anyone and neither did my ancestors. Keep the word master and slave.

> Words are really just words.

But they're not though. Words are products of, and inputs into, people's culture and modes of thought.

Which is exactly why giving this much global power to one unelected politically extreme group of people is so dangerous.

>and neither did my ancestors

Considering the number of ancestors in your past, this is highly unlikely for any human being alive today.

Of master is not acceptable anymore, how are we going to call the MSc or MA degrees?

SAP, for one, makes an exception for the word "master" for cases like the Master's degree, or Scrum Master:

https://help.sap.com/doc/b0322267728e48a28b0c8ee7dd1ab4c7/1....

I guess Motherboard will just have to change its name to Birthingpersonboard.

> Journalist Rebecca Baird-Remba tweeted an “inclusive warning” she received on the word “landlord,” which Google suggested she change to “property owner” or “proprietor.”

> A transcribed interview of neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke—in which he uses the N-word and talks about hunting Black people—gets no notes.

I think unfortunately a lot of folks think this is a feature, not a bug.

This reads like it's April 1st... but it's not. -.-

Hopefully LibreOffice doesn't adopt this sort of thing.

With Libre Office you can be sure if they add such a feature it can always be disabled. With Google or Microsoft you never know when they'll take the toggles away and you have no recourse without source.

I've been privy to people trying to ban words like "whitelabel" at my company. Thankfully, management & executives at my company never stood for that BS so I still get to use whitelist & blacklist in documentation, and don't worry about those non-issues get in the way of me actually doing work.

Google might be too far gone, and working with those people would be so exhausting that it's actually stopped me from applying (James Damore)

There are companies that don't stand for that sort of stuff. And top paying ones too (pay better than Goog). Coinbase is one of them, and I don't want to mention mine to avoid dox. And go check blind, you'll find the vast majority of people don't stand for this BS either, and that they're just silenced.

My advice? Hit them where it hurts & vote with your feet. Google's not the top payer anymore, so just leave.

My problem with all of this "progressiveness" in the workplace is that it just reeks of laziness.

There are real problems in this world, yet it seems that the progressives are going after the minute details. From a SWE perspective, it would be like your app getting crushed by bugs and technical debt while you argue over how big the logo on the login page should be.

The worst part of all of this, is the companies that are actively pushing this crap are the same companies that have the resources to make a difference in this world.

If you're a company with a 1T+ market cap, actually do something bold with your cash. Imagine if all the top tech companies approached a bunch of non-profits trying to help people in 3rd world countries and said: "here's a blank check, do what you need to". We could solve a shitload of problems on this planet.

But no, we all are just quibbling about our pronouns and how to write "inclusively".

Silly question: ignoring any kind of history, why fight for terms like "whitelist" and "blacklist" when terms like "allowlist" and "blocklist" are objectively clearer, especially for folks who's first language is not English?

>"My advice? Hit them where it hurts & vote with your feet. Google's not the top payer anymore, so just leave. "

In principle I agree but I feel like level headed folks choosing to leave only makes the echo chamber even worse. And sadly, I don't think Google as a company will suffer much of a downside because they're so big.

Airbnb did a similar thing, var/schema name whitelabel was excised. Weirdly black label remained. It caused a frontend bug temporarily

whitelist and blacklist are lazy language, even if you ignore the fact that you personally are not bothered by them and you don't have the mental capacity to understand why someone else might be. They carry no intrinsic meaning, and if you can't come up with more descriptive language you are the problem. In all cases you can come up with a better word - include, deny, allow, block, ban, accept, etc. It all depends on what you are actually talking about. Enjoy your high paying job a Truth Social (I bet!).

Google's increasing editorialization is why voice typing is effectively useless to me now because everything I say gets altered and I have to correct it.

The comments on this post sure are something. Do I really have this many peers that apparently live in constant fear of the woke Boogeyman?

Did you mean the Boogeyperson? Some of these terms may not be inclusive to all readers. Consider using different terms.

I think what can be seen is people feeling like someone forcing a change on them. Language, culture, habits are really personal. I think the less someone thinks about theirs consciously, the more personal they are.

Also, as many point it out, this change is often spearheaded by entities of questionable reputation. Google, for one, is grilled a lot for their behavior lately, and now they roll this out.

Lastly, I think that this innate and natural feeling, that "they" will come and change our ways, is preyed upon by populist politicians. When people feel like this, it can be, and is being played up by creating the very Boogeypersons you jokingly made up: they point to immigrants, like LGBT people, successful Jewish businessmen, whatever sticks.

Mindless 'outrage porn' has been a staple on HN for a while.

lol:

"mom test

Don't use mom test, grandmother test, grandma test, or girlfriend test. Instead, use terms like beginner user test or novice user test."

https://developers.google.com/style/word-list#letter-m

Some of them make sense, some of them are ridiculous. The whole thing is entertaining, really.

Google’s office suite has always been amateur hour.

More reason to use free source software on your actual computer less you succumb to the will of 1984+Brave New World as a seevice.

We’re just lucky the suggestions are being offered at write time instead of automatically applied at read time.

"This document has been modified from its original source to remove non-inclusive language."

Closes window

Microsoft is doing the same thing. It's also full of woke BS. For now I can disable it easily. For now. But this obviously yet another slow boil attempt to pass insane policies. In the end we're just gonna communicate using Signal or equivalent; and if we can't even have device that can do that then we're just gonna have to build our own Pi based E2E devices.

It looks like a great SEO woke language sells, whether you like it or not, especially the latter

Oof, this is going to be one of those really really awful threads isn't it?

Spell check is reality Grammar check is sanity Inclusive warnings are vanity

The 'broken' part is that it exists in the first place by default.

This will be hilarious with people writing scientific papers

This is straight up a prelude to Orwellian thought control via language modification. Can nobody really see through this corporate "woke" smokescreen?

It's not about "social justice," it's about instilling totalitarian patterns in the population. There is no debate about these "woke" issues. There's an incredible intolerance on one side, and they claim to have indisputable moral superiority. Anyone who goes against the "woke" agenda is deemed to be evil. There's no debate. Just an automatic classification, "You're wrong AND evil."

That's just how it was in Nazi Germany. No debate, no nuance. You're a jew? To the chambers with you.

> There is no debate about these "woke" issues.

Uhhh isn't this thread a debate?

Most depressing thing since Alphacode.

You can’t imagine anyone with a shred of real dignity or rational thinkers had anything to do with this. So they sent their B team at it.

> Cutting phrases like “whitelist/blacklist” ...out of our vocabulary... addresses years of habitual bias in tech terminology

Vice, you are not helping.

Unless your ancestors had lands confiscated or graves desecrated in a manner you find unjust during the Stuart Restoration, you have no standing to complain about "blacklist".

> Google suggested that Martin Luther King Jr. should have talked about “the intense urgency of now” rather than “the fierce urgency of now” in his “I Have a Dream” speech and edited President John F. Kennedy’s use in his inaugural address of the phrase “for all mankind” to say “for all humankind.” A transcribed interview of neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke—in which he uses the N-word and talks about hunting Black people—gets no notes.

Kek. The absolute state of the FAANG World playing with AI and identity politics

Why don't they just plant a chip in our brains that prevents us from typing these words in the first place, and be done with it?

You mean all this time I could have cashed in on some microaggression victimhood because of all those daughterboards and daughter cards that weren't called son cards? How come that never ocurred to me? How did I survive all these decades with that boot on my neck?

One of the reasons I left google is that their "content moderation team" (the folks who make you take down wrongthink memes) is so far out of touch, that somebody had to explain to them there are people in the world who are discriminated against, but aren't black. They simply didn't know that was the case! And if that's the people who are moderating content...

I said motherboard all the time in meetings and chats, never had any pushback. TBH if I did get pushback on that one, I'd bring it to HR and say the pushback was affecting my ability to get work down.

One of the challenges with moderation teams like that or similar is that the folks who REALLY want to do that job .. are the folks who absolutely should NOT be doing it.

Sorry but did you just say one of the reasons you left google was the memegen moderation team? I can't imagine that being a legitimate worry that would impact my employment decisions.

It seems there's a group of people who are too far in the other direction too. When I heard that it's preferred to say "allowlist" instead of "whitelist", do you know what my reaction was?

"Sure, whatever."

And I moved on with my life. It has zero impact on my day to day. The pushback reminds me of people who deadname others on purpose. Like, who cares? Bob wants to be called Sally now? Sure, whatever.

> that somebody had to explain to them there are people in the world who are discriminated against, but aren't black

I wouldn't have believed you that there are people like this, but a few minutes after i read your comment, i saw replies (requires showdead) to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123102 that said men cannot be discrimated against...

so far out of touch, that somebody had to explain to them there are people in the world who are discriminated against, but aren't black.

Sounds preposterous, but is not. I had a boss around 2000 who believed wholeheartedly that people brought from Africa to the United States were the only slaves that ever existed in history anywhere on Earth.

This came up because someone noted in passing conversation that an anniversary was coming up related to the Atlantic slave trade in the 1600's, and my boss insisted that there couldn't have been slavery before 1776, because slavery was started by the United States.

I walked out of the break room early in the conversation and decided to let the others handle it. She was my boss, and I would have gotten fired for contradicting her.

Put yourself in the shoes of your average content moderator. Aren't they there for the paycheck like most people at their jobs? Why does everyone assume these people are first and foremost bastions of acceptable behaviour? They are instructed by executives as to how to do their jobs. Now executives are learning nuance and say "oh there's more to this than you thought, so here's the updated guidelines to follow now", to shift blame for this broken system to the moderators when all along they were following orders from above.

> I said motherboard all the time in meetings and chats, never had any pushback. TBH if I did get pushback on that one, I'd bring it to HR and say the pushback was affecting my ability to get work down.

And get Damore'd?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123615.

> somebody had to explain to them there are people in the world who are discriminated against, but aren't black.

blinks in disabled lesbian

Holy straw man, Batman!

> somebody had to explain to them there are people in the world who are discriminated against, but aren't black.

As a Russian, this is amusing to read. For me and most people I know, when you meet a black person, it's totally normal to ask them "where are you from" because they can't possibly be local. Our society just doesn't have the concept of racism it seems because of the exceeding rarity of people who aren't European or Asian.

People in Russia are often discriminated against based on their sexual orientation, political views, and nationality though.

Who was asking for Woke Clippy? Is Google just bored and completely out of ideas?

They seem increasingly disconnected with what their users actually want.

I don't think I ever heard such an appropriate turn of phrase as "woke clippy", bravo!

If you read the article, it is clear who their prospective clients are. Big corporations pretending not to be racist. The next iteration will be a corporate-speak translator.

As annoying as a woke clippy might be, at times I realize that we're lucky we don't live in a racist clippy alt reality. "Would you like to expand all mentions of "n-word"?"

I think a grammar checker that warned about cross-cultural confusion would be pretty valuable in many writing contexts. It would best be constructed in that light: rather than moralizing or being activist just noting the fact that some text has a non-trivial odds of being understood in a way different than you likely intended.

So for example, a writer of British English may want to be warned that "Bring me some fags when you return" may be misunderstood by American readers.

This hypothetical checker might still warn you about "master"-- for example-- as there is now a sizable contingent that finds it controversial. ... but it would equally warn you against terms like "birthing person" which is considered by many to be biologically reductive to the point of being offensive, and by most people to be at least highly loaded.

Such a tool would almost certainly not caution you against "landlord".

You could look at Grammarly ($10+ billion dollar valuation) as evidence that there is a market for a tool/plugin that improves a user’s prose.

This is a popular tool in hiring for creating inclusive job descriptions. They're competing with companies like https://textio.com/

Yeah, who asked for this? One would think they'd be trying to achieve feature parity with Microsoft Office instead.

As a corporate culture, Google very much believes that if you ask the pre-car public what they want, they'd say "faster horses."

... and the willingness to take risks has historically served them pretty well.

Since when is black and white primarily a racial thing anyways? It seems a little inverted, like a black flag or a black mark on an account, it’s not like it’s called “negrolist”, black and white are colors before they are slang for race/culture. Maybe instead of neutering the dictionary we could try a different angle and quit lumping people into “white” or “black”? Some people are Kenyan, Irish, Nigerian, German, nobody is actually white or black.

This is indeed the root of my problem with the attempt to cast "blacklist" and "whitelist" as problematic. It confuses cause and effect.

If we're going to try to re-engineer spoken English, I'd much rather address the root causes, which were the adoption of such literally black-and-white terms as racial identifiers in the first place. Calling light-skinned European-descended people "white" and dark-skinned members of the African diaspora "black" was always a divisive oversimplification of a nuanced web of ethnic heritages.

This doesn't fit neatly into a woke/anti-woke framework, but I try to avoid using "black" and "white" to describe people whenever I can, preferring something either more descriptive or contextual.

I think they're trying to change language to disassociate "black" with negative meaning.

Which is going to be very hard, because the reason for the association is from black being the unknown. It's the night that hides the predators. It's the shadow where the enemy hides. It's where you don't want to put your foot in case there are spiders or a sharp rock.

Humans are afraid of the dark. I've not even heard of being afraid of the light.

Death and darkness.

I'd like a historian to confirm, but I'd be very surprised if this type of language didn't exist in most places, including before ever seeing a darker skinned person.

But this effort is doomed to fail. You can be afraid of the dark at night and that is not a predictor at all of racism. Indeed, do people with darker skin not get afraid of the dark?

If you view these things from a POV of empathy for others and how to minimize their stress and sense of being disfavored vs trying to win some technical argument it will make more sense.

Focus on how real actions impact the people around you.

"Blacklist" and "whitelist" suck anyway because they require the cultural knowledge that "black is bad and white is good" to understand their meaning. "Allowlist" and "denylist" don't require any cultural background to understand - their names are purely descriptive. They are just better terms.

This is the hypocrisy of radical leftists in a nutshell. They claim to fight racial thinking while in fact just making it more prominent than it's been in decades.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123767.)

There's a few different things to unpack with this feature.

(1) It would be useful in the context of a general style guide, like a white-label Grammarly. Corporations could set their own prompts for words, phrases, and structures. This would make documentation more consistent.

(2) This is dystopian as fuck. Google has the ability to see, aggregate, and now influence what you write in Google docs and Gmail. Who is making the decision on what to "correct"? Is this algorithm explainable?

Bias: I already disagree with Grammarly as an entire category of product.

Grammarly is also an OS-wide keylogger.

https://www.kolide.com/blog/is-grammarly-a-keylogger-what-ca...

They claim not to be a keylogger, but, you know, Amazon claims that Alexa isn't always listening too and/but/yet also that it'll wake up immediately when you say the right wake word. So, I'd take their claims with a lot of salt.

> Google has the ability to see, aggregate, and now influence what you write in Google docs and Gmail.

Interestingly Microsoft has that power with the Office suite for nearly 40 years now (only a decade if we want to focus on the cloud connected area), do you see specific dystopian influences on society stemming from that ?

> Emily Lipstein typed “Motherboard” (as in, the name of this website) into a document and Google popped up to tell her she was being insensitive: “Inclusive warning. Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers. Consider using different words.”

It’s amazing how a Fortune 500 company can release a product that chastises you for using the word “motherboard” because it has “mother” in it, while other people insist that this is a “fringe” type of thinking and not “mainstream” on the left.

Birthingpersonboard you bigot

"Parentboard".

But yes, anytime you hear "AI-powered" and "Natural language parsing", these kinds of cases are inevitable. I know google prides itself on technology, but there are some things like language that are moving so fast, with so many states that an initiative like this takes actual humans to debug. But given Youtube, it seems like Google is still stuck in the thought that they can automate everything.

FFS

A $trillion corporation's garbage product is The Left now?

> “mainstream” on the left

What connection is there between left/progressive thought and this particular brand of corporate speak?

Fun fact: the longest known distance between two points on Earth is the distance between Google product managers and ordinary people.

To be less flippant, boy could I not give a shit less about the problem this feature is trying to solve. As I look outside, I try to imagine the idea of any of these people in my neighborhood, playing with their dogs, mowing their lawns, driving garbage trucks, potentially losing sleep over someone using “policeman” as opposed to “police officer.” It’s absurd.

To be clear, I do feel genuine empathy for someone if they experience abject pain from minor transgressions. However, I am skeptical that almost anyone actually has that issue. And if they do, this is not how I believe you solve the problem. At all.

And if someone did use the term “police officer” instead of “policeman”, it would be no skin off my nose. That’s totally fine, both are natural and reasonable. Whatever. But I don’t need my fucking word processor telling me to self-police my language harder. That’s not a feature I want. In fact, I don’t even like the idea of this feature.

This all feels like cargo culting. If we pretend we’re in a society further removed from a racist, sexist past, does that make us further removed? I don’t think it does. Before the issues with blacklist/whitelist or slave/master were brought to the forefront, I really, really doubt almost anyone had racist or problematic visualizations in their mind. I think they had completely abstract concepts in their mind. Plenty of words probably have a deeply racist origin, but if that’s not what people actually think about when they hear the word, does that history even matter? Aren’t we just creating more problems?

Even if you disagree with all of my viewpoints, I hope you’ll agree that this is going to serve to make people much more radical over time as they perceive these features to either serve as an attack on themselves or their way of lives, or as evidence that people who don’t self-correct incessantly are secretly neo-nazis. To me, it just seems like a lose-lose, because it feels like no matter what I do, people are going to view my rejection of these ideals and pigeonhole me into either of these camps. Or is using the word “camp” also a bad idea due to World War II?

I’m sure some people will read this some day and think I’ve lost my mind. I don't care. For the love of fuck, Go Outside once in a while.

> I really, really doubt almost anyone had racist or problematic visualizations in their mind.

Reminds me how we used to have Backlog Grooming meetings, but we had to change the name because apparently "grooming" is something pedophiles do.

Poor naive me, I thought it was something my parents- sorry, birthing persons- had done for their poodle when it was getting too shaggy.

MS: "We now concede that Clippy was the most annoying, patronizing and flawed UX feature ever created."

Google: "Hold my beer..."

This AI strikes me as being so dystopian. Time to break out and read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four again.

A true AI would respond to user behavior and back off or change accordingly. Reminds me of Google News which keeps inserting articles about Kardashians no matter how often I tell it to "include fewer of these stories". For all the hype of Google's advanced AI, instead we get faceless, imperious NannyTech.

Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers.

Try using:

[carbonated malt beverage]

Isn't Microsoft rolling out a similar feature into Word 365, though?

This is sure to dismantle systemic racism.

But in all seriousness I think this stuff is great. It pushes more people away from insane woke culture. I’m starting to see even the most progressive friends and colleagues pause and think twice about how cringeworthy all of this is.

Let it happen.

I'm seeing that happen too --- there's been a very noticeable "migration" of left-leaning folk I know, towards the right; and many of these are actually the type of people that the whole "inclusiveness" thing is attempting to please.

“Cutting phrases like “whitelist/blacklist” and “master/slave” out of our vocabulary not only addresses years of habitual bias in tech terminology,”

no it doesn’t. it does literally nothing except make a person feel like they did something when they did nothing, like posting a black square on instagram, so they can go right back to being a starbucks slurping propaganda watching cow.

“Shifts in our speech like swapping “manned” for “crewed” spaceflight are attempts to correct histories of erasing women and non-binary people from the industries where they work.”

yea I can’t wait for the sequel to Hidden Figures where we learn it wasn’t actually black women who were responsible for landing a man on the moon (should we say land a person on the moon?), it was actually nonbinary otherkin with purple hair who really made it happen. it will be called Extremely Hidden Figures

Yet another reason "Product" is a joke

I really don't get the logic behind the "landlord" one. In what world can "landlords" be considered an oppressed group that needs special consideration for inclusivity? Is the endgame here Google suggesting "benevolent autocratic ruler" instead of "dictator" to be more inclusive?

Well, such things are always driven by demand. And unfortunately, there is a strong demand in our society for policing words, renaming formulas and issuing apologies all while:

* Property ownership is becoming out of question for an increasing fraction of Americans

* Any kid of retirement (as in not having to work and enjoying life off your savings) has become a pipe dream

* Having a single-income family with one parent dedicated to raising the children has become unaffordable.

* Even if you managed to put enough effort to teach your kids the values of hard work and setting long-term goals, the public education system is set to confuse them and kick them off that path, so they will never be competitive with those who received education abroad.

At the same time, the media oligopoly [0] keeps ignoring the problems and pushing the narratives how addressing short-term emotional problems is the top 1 priority, and anyone who wants real prosperity instead of taking a part in the never-ending mutual comforting game is the enemy of the people.

I wonder if people will ever realize they are being manipulated into poverty before it's too late.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31077525

The elites of America use "inclusivity" and race as bait to distract from the very issues you describe.

Notice how we, as a society, spent relatively little time discussing the 2008 Mortgage Crisis and Occupy Wall Street.

Meanwhile news outlets have been beating the "inclusivity" / race / gender drum for _years_.

Time to wake up, folks.

What I don't understand is, where is this perceived demand coming from? I think it is an extremely small minority that happens to be extremely loud on social media and in corporate circles, so the perception of how important this issue is has become grossly exaggerated. I don't think this is purposeful malice on anyone's part, I think it is just a product of social media amplification and the elites desire to constantly virtue signal to each other that has led to this absurd loop in our culture.

May I ask what the items in your enumerated list have to do with “policing words?”

This is an article nearly entirely built around a viral Tweet regarding "landlord" cause Vice writers live in a strange world where that is essentially a slur they want to use, and then found two edge cases to make it an "article".

Why would "landlord" be considered a slur?

Please, explain your thinking in more detail.

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