HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

Google’s Assistive Writing Feature Provided Allegedly Unnecessary and Clumsy Suggestions

April 19, 2022

Google’s “inclusive language” feature prompting writers to consider alternatives to non-inclusive words reportedly also recommend alternatives for words such as “landlord” and “motherboard,” which critics said was a form of obtrusive, unnecessary, and bias-reinforcing speech-policing.
Alleged deployer
google-docs
Alleged developer
google-docs
Alleged harmed parties
google-docs-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/177

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.