This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
I found this while browsing Reddit, and going past the first reaction of "this is terrible" I think it can spark an interesting discussion on machine learning and how our own societal problems can end up creating bad habits and immortalizing those issues when building such systems.
So, what do you guys think about this?
As I stated in another comment, in cases like this with gender neutrality it could easily use "he/she" instead of assuming, it would interpret the text more accurately while being respectful and without going out of the defined dictionary by using "them" or something like this.
As a lifelong grammarian, I've always hate hate hated that English lacks a technically "correct" gender-neutral third person singular pronoun, and I'm frankly rather relieved to see an emerging consensus forming around "they." It may seem awkward for now, but this is how languages evolve - a grammatical "error" gets wedged into a niche to serve a linguistic need. The change is already happening, and in fifty years no one will remember or care that it used to be wrong.
Boy, I wish I could say the same for portuguese (my native language). It has the same issue but the second someone tries to bring the idea up they are instantly treated like the "twitter cancer trying to destroy our language".
Same here in Germany.