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Comment by onionisafruit | Hacker News Reader

Those aren’t the only options. You can just let it suggest what it is going to suggest. Copilot is a product for adults who should be able to comprehend what machine learning is. Anybody who throws a fit about it will only be exposing themselves as a fool.

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

I would love to see a origin/latin etc breakdown of the word behave. One of my least favorite words (authority issues much? Yes).

https://www.etymonline.com/word/behave#etymonline_v_8255

The problem is that if you train an ML model with a bunch of data that happened to be available in the past, then the system will perpetuate the same biases as were inherent in the training data. This leads to the (real issue) Google image classifier categorizing an image of a black man as a "gorilla" etc.

Certain words are heavily loaded and are worth just skipping to avoid all the hassle for now.

Btw, the gorilla incident was overblown. Overblown in the sense that people from other races (including whites) were also classified as some hilarious animals.

Gorilla and black just was the most politically charged one of the bunch.

(The other potentially politically charged one was some tendency to misclassify people of various levels of body fats as various animals.)

> Certain words are heavily loaded and are worth just skipping to avoid all the hassle for now.

If memory serves right, that was Google's pragmatic solution: if they detected a human in the picture, they 'manually' suppressed the animal classification.

So they lost being able to classify 'Bob and his dog' in return for not accidentally classifying a picture of just Alice as a picture of a seal.

> Copilot is a product for adults [...]

If you didn't meant "should be" (for which I'm not willing to take any position), no, Copilot is not a product for adults [1] [2].

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... "A User must be at least 13 years of age."

[2] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

I'm sure the commenter didn't mean adults as legally adults but as someone that understand what machine learning is and won't throw a fit if the computer says something he disagrees with.

A 13 years old is perfectly capable of that, I know many 40 years old that aren't.

A minimum age for accepting terms of use isn't the same thing as a target demographic.

No, but the minimum age requirement affects the handling of questionable contents, which can never be "doing nothing" as the GP suggested.

Fair point.

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

Not every country where Microsoft is doing business in has the same mores as the western world.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...

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

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

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