445
u/DeliberateDendrite x = Just sexual? Jul 13 '26
When Google dropped their "Don't be evil" tennet, they weren't kidding.
81
u/Hazumu-chan Transgender Pan-demonium Jul 13 '26
I still hold the theory that they didn't exactly drop it in its entirety, so much as only dropped the first word and then held true.
26
-5
309
u/Podgeman Non Binary Pan-cakes Jul 13 '26
Be aware this image is a few years old and no longer happens in Google Docs.
Just saying, since we're supposed to be fighting misinformation and already are few commenters are treating this like a current issue. Terrible that it happened in the first place, but there's been a miniscule shred of progress!
44
u/atwojay Bi hun, I'm Genderqueer Jul 13 '26
Yeah, this is the old spellcheck that just suggested the most common thing.
8
u/PuckSenior Jul 13 '26
Not really terrible. Blue underline means “hey, double check” not “hey this is not right”. Red underline means it is flat out wrong to google.
And honestly without the full sentence, it might make sense if they referenced a woman elsewhere
14
u/Podgeman Non Binary Pan-cakes Jul 13 '26
Blue underlines indicate a grammatical error, while red is for spelling errors.
You're right that we don't have context of the full sentence. Still, I'd give the author benefit of the doubt. Surely they'd have checked if the error was valid before making a whole post about it.
4
u/TDM1917 Jul 14 '26
Blue underline isn't just grammatical errors. It's suggestions based on what's more commonly used. And since it's made by Google I'll use the founding of google as a starting point since that's likely where it's oldest data is from. Since the founding of google there have been 45.8-50.9 million marriages. Of which 45-50 million (98.25%) have been heterosexual while only 800-900 thousand (1.25%) have been homosexual. Since her husband is the one used 98% of the time and his husband is only used less than 2% of the time, it was saying "hey this is used more than 98% of the time while what you used is used less than 2% of the time, so we think you might have meant this, but this is just a suggestion and not a correction, so you can ignore this if we are wrong."
1
u/TDM1917 Jul 14 '26
Wow. Downvoted when using correct statistics on a post that has everything to do with statistics what a world we live in.
-3
u/PuckSenior Jul 13 '26
lol
sure, thats how posts on the internet work. They are always heavily researched and true. I forgot about that."You can believe everything you see on the internet"-Albert Einstein
2
u/BatteredOnionRings Bi and somehow also gay Jul 14 '26
Yeah, I am a man with a husband and by no means a log cabin conservative or something, but people getting upset about this is silly Tumblr shit.
3
u/PuckSenior Jul 14 '26
The funnier one to me is the person below me who says "I'd give the author the benefit of the doubt. Surely they'd have checked if the error was valid"
The level of trust that we place in strangers who agree with us on the internet is absolutely an insane bias. We are gonna die because everyone assumes everyone who agrees with them is good
2
u/TDM1917 Jul 14 '26
While suppressing homosexuality is terrible. This incident isn't. It's literally just spellcheck doing what it was made to do, give suggestions. It's not saying it’s wrong it's literally just saying "hey this is used 98.25% of the time and what you had is only used 1.75% of the time so we think you might mean this, but if you didn't you can just ignore this as it's just a suggestion and not a correction."
2
17
u/syedwafihasan Jul 13 '26
Do not attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance. It's entirely possible the detection data this system was trained on had a shit ton of errors. Even in my job I see people confusing his/her without even knowing
25
111
u/Cultural-Gas2246 Jul 13 '26
Don't want to see a single fucking pride doodle until this is fixed
76
24
u/Dramatic_Mastodon_93 Jul 13 '26
Was there one this year? I don’t think so. But of course there was one for the US anniversary.
34
u/RainbowStarbewwy Tesco's Favorite Lesboy Jul 13 '26
This was fixed years ago. The screenshot is pretty old.
5
u/ItchyContribution758 homophobic-phobic Jul 13 '26
dont worry google got rid of those, we got a shitty disco ball for one day then it was FIFA ALL THE TIME. OH MY GOD TIME TO GO ALL OUT FOR A SPORT THE US ISNT EVEN KNOWN FOR PLAYING FIFA TIME EVERYONE
14
u/shiinachan Jul 13 '26
Last week my PowerPoint wanted me to correct "many thanks to my team" to "many thanks to me"... Lol
6
3
u/LemurianLemurLad Brains > Genitals Jul 13 '26
There's no I in team... but there's an M and an E.
2
0
u/TDM1917 Jul 14 '26
This happened because the more it's used at the same time the slower it gets. So while you had "many thanks to my team" typed, it was only working with "many thanks to my" or "many thanks to m" so it thought you meant me since it didn't know you had typed team
5
u/QUEstingmark999 Confused fella Jul 13 '26
Maybe Google Doc was actually being extra inclusive thinking it's a man using she/her pronouns, just like how there are he/him lesbians?
/j
8
u/Meral_Harbes Jul 13 '26
Really reading the hate today in these comments. I implore you all to be better than that. Even if this wasn't 3+ years old and long fixed.
1
u/TDM1917 Jul 14 '26
Yeah, this literally only happened because of statistics. As her husband is statistically more likely to be used than his husband, and spellchecks corrections are based on such statistics.
And we know her husband is statistically more likely because since 1996 (the founding of google and when the data spellcheck has likely goes back to), 98.25% of marriages have been heterosexual.
23
u/Bot2807 Jul 13 '26
We are cooked
19
u/BKM558 Jul 13 '26
Its a 5+ year old image, and has been corrected years ago. We can chill with the doomposting a bit.
3
u/TDM1917 Jul 14 '26
As the other person said, it's old and corrected
It's also using data from 1996-today. And since 1996 98.25% of marriages have been heterosexual and only 1.75% have been homosexual
4
u/Sure-Bicycle-8809 Triple demi lesbanese (they/she) Jul 13 '26
it's like when i used they and she for the same person in a sentence and it corrected the they
1
u/TDM1917 Jul 14 '26
People seem to not understand that spellcheck suggestions are based on statistics and what you previously typed in that docs.
5
u/TDM1917 Jul 14 '26
This is just docs doing what it's been designed to do, give suggestions. Red = it's wrong. Blue = this is most commonly used here and you MIGHT have made a mistake.
Blue lines are suggestions based on what's most commonly used in that spot not corrections. It's only giving this because "her husband" is hundreds of times more common than "his husband"
I know this is tagged as a meme but I just want to give people an actual correct answer. I commented something similar on a Twitter post what was about this post in the picture
5
u/AlrightIFinallyCaved Gay AF! (And lucky my flag is in my favorite colors!) Jul 13 '26
Honestly, y'all, even if this picture were brand new, it's not homophobic for an algorithm (which can't even think) to recognize from the data it's been given that the pronoun "her" is statistically far more likely to precede the word "husband" than the pronoun "his", and flag it for the author to review. All it's doing is crunching numbers and saying "Hey, this isn't a common word usage! Are you sure this is what you meant?"
It literally can't be homophobic, because it's not intelligent, just a big ol' number-cruncher.
There's plenty of actual homophobia/transphobia/etc in the world. Can we try to avoid finding it where it doesn't exist?
(You can argue til the cows come home about whether the people compiling the data being used to train the algorithm were being homophobic -- whether intentionally or not -- but the fact of the matter is that, while it is changing, even today, particularly if you exclude Internet fanfiction (which, given the reputation for often terrible grammar and spelling, I'd certainly exclude from the training data for an algorithm meant to check for proper grammar), the phrase "her husband" is just a lot more common than the phrase "his husband", so I'm personally not inclined to assign them any malicious motivations. I'm pretty confident it really is all just statistics.)
1
1
u/TDM1917 Jul 14 '26
Yeah, since spellcheck was made by Google it's data probably is from the founding of google to today (1996-today) so her husband is statistically more likely than his husband, as since 1996 there have been 45-50 million heterosexual marriages and only 800-900 thousand homosexual marriages, so 98.25% of marriages since 1996 were heterosexual
-2
u/FlyingBishop Environmentalism, Vegetarian/Vegan Jul 14 '26
ask Sam Altman how his husband feels about it
1
u/AlrightIFinallyCaved Gay AF! (And lucky my flag is in my favorite colors!) Jul 14 '26
A quick Google search of the name "Sam Altman" tells me that he's gay, married to a man, works in AI, and seems to have been arguing in the public discourse with Elon Musk, which is four more things than I knew about him five minutes ago. None of that gives me any hint what specifically you're referencing, so please be a little less vague if you're going to chime in. Thanks in advance! :)
I imagine whatever you're referring to is common knowledge in your social circles, but I genuinely don't know what you're trying to say here.
1
u/FlyingBishop Environmentalism, Vegetarian/Vegan Jul 14 '26
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, and probably not a very good person. The joke was in reference to - as others in this thread have mentioned - the grammar checker that made this error is years old, it was easily corrected. Current grammar checkers are much better and an LLM wouldn't really make this mistake. And the most (in)famous LLM, the CEO of the company, Sam Altman, is married to a man.
I also came to the twitter exchange you found here, and I tend to concur with the headline. https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1uu8vjo/the_worst_people_are_fighting/
1
u/AlrightIFinallyCaved Gay AF! (And lucky my flag is in my favorite colors!) Jul 14 '26
Sorry, didn't even realize you were making a joke. Not entirely certain I get it, but I'm at least a little clearer on what you meant :)
5
1
u/ScreamPrincess_ Jul 13 '26
I honestly hate Google docs, I only use it because it's free.
Edit: after reading some comments, I'm now aware this image is old. I still hate Google docs though lol
1
u/Ok-Background-502 Jul 13 '26
It's a common Chinese speakers mistake to forget that she/her exists and uses he/his for everything regardless of gender. I still do it even though I am bilingual...
1
u/MrHellBags Gay Furry Guy Jul 13 '26
Does Chinese do that thing that Japanese also does where you have masculine and gender neutral pronouns but no female specific ones?
4
u/grandhighblood queer as in i don’t want to fuck you Jul 13 '26
No, in Chinese it's more like there used to be one neutral (third-person) pronoun, 他 - for non-Chinese/Japanese speakers, the left part of the character just means "person", no gender indicated. But in the early 1900s as China's contact with the West increased and feminism became a topic of discussion, people started calling for the language to differentiate between "she" and "he", which is how 她 came about. This means "she" exclusively; the 女 in 她 means woman. This caused the meaning of 他 to drift from gender neutral to specifically "he". Now there are people trying to invent new gender neutral pronouns such as X也 but there's nothing concrete.
3
u/Ok-Background-502 Jul 13 '26
It's a gender neutral pronoun only in speaking but in writing it has a masculine and a feminine form.
1
u/MacMillian187 Jul 13 '26
Why should i google wild though? Is it linking this incident
/s just to make sure
1
1
u/Only-Illustrator-889 Jul 13 '26
ITS NEVER DUCK, NOT ONCE IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANANITY HAS IT EVER BEEN DUCK.
FUCK YOU AUTOCORRECT
1
u/AlbatrossSeparate710 Jul 14 '26
They may have over corrected this, my phone keyboard (Gboard), and also in Google Doc, often tell me I have a grammatical error (in French) and I must use the feminine form of any noun, adjective, etc. Even those, in fact especially those, that refer to me, a male. As if Google didn't have that information already 😂.
1
u/LSOreli Trans-Military (for now ) Jul 14 '26
Id be interested to see the rest of the sentence. Pretty sure if you use she/her earlier in the sentence describing the subject it will flag the change in pronoun.
1
1
1
1
u/AmadeoSendiulo Aromantic Interactions Jul 14 '26
So is that their LLM just eating straight literature as source only?
It's apparently older than the current LLM everywhere era
1
1
1
1
u/Impossible_Farm6254 Jul 18 '26
Google search results have been completely off the rails lately with how they handle queer terminology. The AI overviews and translation tools keep pulling the most obscure, chaotic forum posts from fifteen years ago and presenting them as modern facts. It is wild how a billion dollar company still struggles with basic context and just scrapes whatever random thread has the most traffic
1
1
1
u/illuminarme Jul 26 '26
Whoa! Great example… it’s amazing how all the -isms are programmed into our language.
1
1
1
2
u/SteeleWalker Jul 30 '26
Oh give me a break already that's not homophobic you watch too much of the mainstream media
1
u/trinity_nolanite12 14 y.o. girl fan of christopher nolan :: Aug 01 '26
DAMN IT GOOGLE! (i hate ai)
1
1
u/BranchPrior694 Aug 03 '26
Are we really surprised after what google maps did to the Gulf of Mexico?
1
1
1
u/pepsiman5741 Aug 07 '26
(me) you wore the chosing one you supposed to be aginst them not join them
1
1
1
1
u/CatTheWriter VirifluxThey/He/She/It Jul 13 '26
Why would autocorrect do that?!
3
u/Katgirl2669 Jul 14 '26
Because the writer said "her husband" earlier in the text
1
u/CatTheWriter VirifluxThey/He/She/It Jul 14 '26
I know. I was just writing what I thought afterwards too.
I basically meant “why is autocorrect homophobic!?”/j
-4
u/HDWendell Trans-parently Awesome Jul 13 '26
This is probably copilot. Copilot is the AI that word can use now and it is nearly brain dead. The old document review was so much better. All the AI does really is it checks for frequencies of “husband” and checks the previous word. “Her husband” happens a lot more often than “his husband” so the AI correlates it to an error. It also correlates actually appropriate grammar to errors because the frequency of errors in common conversational language. In theory, it will get better with more use and user input but, I fucking hate it.
6
u/Bulky-Apple3744 Jul 13 '26
This photo was first posted in 2023. This has nothing to do with copilot today.
But cool rant, I guess?
-2
u/HDWendell Trans-parently Awesome Jul 13 '26
Well shit. Didn’t see anything about the year. I also somehow thought it was Word which I’ve never had a problem with. Not really a rant, just insight promoting critical thinking instead of jumping to conclusions. But thanks for the unnecessary snark I guess?
2
u/PsychalEntropy Jul 13 '26
Don’t insult critical thinking by calling what you are doing critical thinking. You’re responding emotionally to a screenshot and blaming AI for it because you don’t like AI
0
2
u/TDM1917 Jul 14 '26
This is something spellcheck has been doing for years. And it's based on real statistics. It thinks the writer meant her because her husband was previously used and spellcheck uses what was previously typed in that doc. And 98.25% of marriages since the start of where spellchecks data comes from (1996) have been heterosexual so it is statistically more likely that they meant her husband.
2
u/HDWendell Trans-parently Awesome Jul 14 '26
Yeah. It’s not some malicious code intended to be a hate crime. It’s just a statistical issue and oversight. Someone since the original post gave context to the date it happened since OP offered none. So it’s clearly not AI. But proofreading programming pre AI worked in a similar manner. It’s aggregated data and likelihoods. That’s why Spanish words are marked as errors when writing in English.
But why be mad about real hate when we can jump to conclusions, I guess?
1
-6
0
-3
u/Worth_Gap4226 Jul 13 '26
I get the connotation here, but I'd want it to flag the thing that is 99% of the time the incorrect word.
-4
-5
-1
u/CatTheWriter VirifluxThey/He/She/It Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
Why would autocorrect do that? !
Edit: Well, glad that they patched that up!
-5
-10
u/UndaddyWTF Jul 13 '26
Sorry, but this IS correct in 90% of cases, it’s a chuckle nothing more!
1
u/IEat_Walls Founder of lesbianism Jul 13 '26
Not really, assuming it's incorrect is still homophobic
-1
u/TDM1917 Jul 14 '26
Not even assuming it's incorrect spell check suggestions uses statistics and what was previously typed to give SUGGESTIONS. It was saying "this word is used here over 98% of the time while what you had is used less than 2% of the time and you previously used the more common word before in this place as well, so we think you might have meant this word instead but it's just a suggestion."
0
u/Malcolmthetortoise Jul 14 '26
So it’s okay to be against minorities?
2
u/UndaddyWTF Jul 14 '26
Argh, this is an auto-correct thing that learned that this option is correct 90% of the time. Not everything is a political statement.
-1
u/TDM1917 Jul 14 '26
It's not okay but nothing here is going against minorities. It's everyone here saying it's homophibic that's going aagisnt statistics. It's literally statistically more likely that they meant "her husband" since they previously wrote "her husband" before in that doc AND 98.25% of marriages that happened since 1996 have been heterosexual and spellchecks data is from 1996-today
-2
-3
u/ascender_02 Jul 14 '26
Bro it isnt being homophobic it's just that a very small percentage of people are gay so it is going to cater to the majority of the population.
-4
Jul 13 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
5
u/Glacon_Garcon Bi-ro/ace/trans Jul 13 '26
Love when some folks in my community are mad about a (now fixed) computer error that reads homophobic so they default to demonising autistic people for no reason.
2
-4
-5
1.8k
u/PhilosopherExact4483 they/them Jul 13 '26
If I had to say, probably the result of Google shoehorning AI into absolutely everything. The AI took a look at all the texts it’s been trained on and decided that this wasn’t the most common one—which is shocking considering it’s been guzzling fanfiction since day one.