2w ago

Copilot stops working on `gender` related subjects

github.com Copilot stops working on `gender` related subjects · community · Discussion #72603

As some people already mentioned here or here, Copilot purposely stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from Github, such as gender or sex. I am labelling this as a bug because ...

Copilot purposely stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from Github, such as gender or sex. And if you prefix transactional data as trans_ Copilot will refuse to help you. 😑

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..this is from 2023?
- I'm still experiencing this as of Friday.
  I work in school technology and copilot nopety-nopes anytime the code has to do with gender or ethnicity.
  
  Really? Maybe my variable names and column headers were sufficiently obscure and technical that I didn’t run into these issues about a month ago. Didn’t have any problems like that when analyzing census data in R and made Copilot generate most of the code.
  Is this one of those US exclusive things?
  I definitely did refer to various categories such as transgender or homosexual in the code, and copilot was ok with all of them. Or maybe that’s the code I finally ended up with after modifying it. I should run some more tests to see if it really is allergic to queer code.
  Edit: Made some more code that visualizes the queer data in greater detail. Had no issues of any kind. This time, the inputs to Copilot and the code itself had many references to “sensitive subjects” like sex, gender and orientation. I even went a bit further by using exact words for each minority.
  
  Specifically, it will not write the word "Gender" where it will write "HomePhone".
  Maybe there's some setting that's causing us to get different results?
  Edit: saw your note about U.S. exclusive and that could definitely be it.
  
  That does not match with my experience
  
  Should have specified, I'm using GitHub Copilot, not the regular chat bot.
  
  Ah. Makes sense that your experience may not match mine then.
  
  Can you get around it by renaming fields? Sox or jander? Ethan?
  
  Why would anyone rename a perfectly valid variable name to some garbage term just to please our Microsoft Newspeak overlords? That would make the code less readable and more error prone. Also everything with human data has a field for sex or gender somewhere, driver's licenses, medical applications, biological studies and all kinds of other forms use those terms.
  But nobody really needs to use copilot to code, so maybe just get rid of it or use an alternative.
  
  There's 2 ways to go on it. Either not track the data, which is what they want you to do, and protest until they let you use the proper field names, or say fuck their rules, track the data anyway, and you can produce the reports you want. And you can still protest, and when you get the field names back it's just a replace all tablename.gender with tablename.jander. Different strokes different folks
- ...3 weeks ago I am bumping this discussion just to add a voice - the hospital I work at is attempting to harmonize how old and new systems store things like sex and gender identity in an effort to model the social complexities of the topic in our database as health outcomes have been proven to be demonstrably better when doctor's honors a patient's preferred name and gender expression
  This may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, under the current administration.
  
  Yeah, or someone will die because lab result baselines that are dependent on sex get fucked up.
  Politics need to stay the fuck out of medicine. Having people try and do a political dance around lab science is a recipe for disaster.
  
  I don't disagree, and at the same time, this is where we are. 🤷‍♀️
  
  US horseshoe reality. The right is anti vaccines the left is dogmatically anti-biology in medicine. I feel bad for normal people living in the US. It's like common sense and pragmatism was bred out of the gene pool.
  
  the left is dogmatically anti-biology in medicine
  lolwut
  Accepting that gender is a social construct has literally nothing to do with biology. I promise you that even the most diehard Leftists still understand what biological sex means.
  
  even the most diehard Leftists still understand what biological sex mean.
  In two words: Binary; Immutable.
  
  What value is there you knowing my expression of ARHGAP1? What about TP53BP1?
  
  Who's anti-biology, again? 🙄

54 comments