Yahoo Finance Google Docs to prompt users to write in gender-free language
Google will prompt users of its software to write in non-gendered language to ensure they do not offend colleagues or friends.
When writing in a shared Google Docs file, the online word processing tool will suggest edits if someone types a word it does not deem to be “inclusive”. If an employee writes “chairman”, for example, it will show a pop-up which suggests changing the word to “chairperson” or “mail carrier” instead of “mailman”.
Google will also make other stylistic suggestions like to avoid passive voice or offensive language.
The changes, announced at Google’s I/O Developer conference in Mountain View, California on Tuesday, follow several embarrassments for the technology giant thanks to its predictive algorithms.
In 2018 it stealthily blocked a Gmail auto-complete function from suggesting gender pronouns like “him” or “her” for fear of offending users. After its launch, engineers began to notice that the artificial intelligence-based technology was making biased presumptions. If someone typed “I am meeting an investor next week,” for example, it would suggest “Do you want to meet him” instead of “her” as a follow up question.
It altered its search engine’s autocomplete function in 2016 after it began suggesting the anti-Semitic query “are jews evil” when someone searched for information on the religion. The issue was because the algorithm was regurgitating searches made by other users, thinking they would be the most useful.
Just one year earlier, it apologised when its image recognition feature for its photo album service labelled a black couple as gorillas.
Google has already updated its “style guide” for developers who make apps that appear on its Play Store, requesting that any documentation which appears with their software is as inclusive as possible.
This means avoiding the word “crazy” and using “baffling” instead, or changing the phrase “dummy variable” to “placeholder variable”. Google also recommends editing sentences like, “before launch, give everything a final sanity-check” to, “before launch, give everything a final check for completeness and clarity”.
In addition to its “inclusive language” prompts, Google said it will also add emojis to Docs, “to gauge the team’s reactions as you work together”.
The company announced a quantum computing laboratory in Santa Barbara, California and updates to Android 12, the latest version of its mobile operating system.
