I didn't need another reason to hate "AI," but now I have one

[cosmolinguist]

Someone else recorded a meeting I need to take notes for, and I just noticed that in the AI notes she sent me, the they/them pronoun user has been misgendered! Despite saying extemely clearly in their introduction that they use they/them pronouns!

And I don't think anyone in the meeting misgendered them (I flatter myself at being pretty good at spotting this!) so I wonder how the AI decided which binary pronouns to assign them. Just from formants, or something?

Anyway, grr.

Comments

[barakta]

Grrr.

In our place one of the LGBT staff group discovered there's a setting in Teams where you can set your pronoun without making it your display name (I must check how visible that is in meetings or ask people what they see for me as mine is set). It would be NICE if AI bullshitters could utilise that.

We aren't allowed AI summarisers cos of cybersecurity and data protection in meetings. Otter is blocked serverside from all BCU systems. They're currently blatting copilot till they trust it more.

[meepettemu]

I have it set up on my work teams. It’s not immediately accessible. You have to click on to the person’s name to bring their ‘card’ up and then it gives specified pronouns at the top of the card

[meepettemu]

I don’t know if outsiders to your org see it at all - I only have experience of looking at complete ‘guest’ users (prospective students mostly) so I would imagine most of them haven’t set theirs up

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah that's a good point; the most I've ever seen about an external person is their e-mail address, and sometimes not even that!

[barakta]

That's actually kind of annoying, cos you really want an option to display it in situations where a person might pronoun you e.g. in a meeting. May have to revert to she/her after my name again on principle.

[meepettemu]

It is annoying. We rarely hover over people’s names for the sake of it!

Sadly I can’t change my name display so just have to lump it.

[cosmolinguist]

there's a setting in Teams where you can set your pronoun without making it your display name

Yeah, I have that set, and maybe half the people in my org who I've hovered over the name of seem to have it set (that's how I can see it, only on hover when that little profile thing pops up). Including this person who uses they/them pronouns. So yeah, if Microsoft's own AI isn't capable of taking the information we give Microsoft, I'm really unimpressed with it.

We aren't allowed AI summarisers cos of cybersecurity and data protection in meetings.

I'm shocked that we are but then my org is bizarrely run by technocrats, so AI/Copilot is everywhere. :(

[otter]

Grrrr.

[nanila]

I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that AIs reflect the techbro view of the world, but it sure is depressing.

[cosmicjellyfish]

Ugh. This feels like yet another case of “all ‘AI’ can do is replicate the biases of its programmers”.

[cosmolinguist]

Or indeed of its training data, which won't include nearly enough people using they/them (much less neopronouns).

[silveradept]

Blargh. Foolish things can't even get a person's gender right.

Wouldn't be surprised if the transcriber program assigns gender based on vocal range or something like that.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah I assume it's vocal range or possibly name? This person has the classic non-binary fem name+masc name with a hyphen, but the part before the hyphen in their case is the gender the AI went with.

[silveradept]

Probably something in the code that discards whatever's after the hyphen and assumes the true name is whatever comes before it. All the fallacies believed about names, after all.