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Google’s Smart Compose feature, should you try to enable it, will attempt to predict what you’re about to say next in an email based on what you’ve previously typed.
One thing the feature doesn’t do, however, is attempt to guess the proper pronoun of address for the person you are writing to.
According to a new Reuters story, “Google’s technology will not suggest gender-based pronouns because the risk is too high that its ‘Smart Compose’ technology might predict someone’s sex or gender identity incorrectly and offend users.”
This is a smart move, and we applaud Google for both making it and being willing to acknowledge why it did so. Simply put, the company has yet to find a way to build an AI that can accurately determine the gender of the person being emailed.
The company discovered the problem in January when Gmail product manager Paul Lambert typed “I am meeting an investor next week,” and Smart Compose suggested “Do you want to meet him?” as a potential next response when the individual in question was actually a woman.
The article notes that Google tried several workarounds, but has been unable to find a machine learning solution thus far that cleanly prevents the issue.
The issue arises in part because the data sets used to train AI for Natural Language Generation are based on billions of sentences sentences that encode expectations about the sorts of assumptions the AI should make.
If the overwhelming majority of doctors, businesspeople, and investors referenced in an NLG data set are male, the AI is going to learn that the proper pronoun to attach to that profession is male. The problem, of course, is figuring out how to teach an AI to recognize exceptions to the rule.