- There is a chance, quantified by some metric, where a person is suggested a word that is offensive to them or their culture because a probabilistic model made the wrong decision.
- There is no chance that the above happens.
Apple will choose the latter, time and time again, because they are risk averse and freedom is not particularly high on their values list. We’re talking about the company that doesn’t let you type the Taiwanese flag in China, or the pride flag in Russia. It’s no surprise you’re not allowed to swipe “fuck” in the United States. I used to work at Apple.
At the risk of being controversial, isn't there also the choice not to implement autocomplete and then avoid the above conundrum, especially once you factor in the fact that they can't possibly catch all combinations of words/letters so a grey list isn't actually an effective solution either, other than it provides a we tried defense.
The ultimate problem being some subset of consumers want autocomplete and some subset will retain the right to be offended and some subset will be both of those?
EDIT: And at what point does accidently sending male chauvinist pig to your boss because of autocomplete absolve you of the responsibility of reading the message before you send it?
Is there any reason apple can't give us the choice of.
The biggest problem with it for me is it also affects swipe typing by tracing over the letters. There’s no way to implement that (and have it be even slightly usable) without some amount of predictive text.
If it didn’t auto complete then that would be fine when hitting keys individually, but when I’m swiping the words, it means no matter how accurate I am or how many attempts I make, it will literally never produce that word in that position.
And it’s contextual. Obviously I can swipe in “me,” but if it’s after the word “kill” then it’s banned, and I simply can’t dedicate the space in my head to learning this inscrutable list of banned phrases that until this article I’d been unable to find anywhere so I could only ever discover a phrase was on it by having an extremely frustrating time trying and failing to type it until I realized “oh, this is a politically or emotionally charged phrase (or could be in a different context) and I’m not that bad at typing so it’s probably banned.”
In the few instances that I’ve been able to see a total stranger prompt a model, I learn a lot about them.
The model output is fairly uniform because the models are fairly uniform, but the input is how I understand the prompter’s theory of mind for the LLM.
The higher fidelity the theory of mind, the more productive the resulting conversation is. Basic things, like knowing what the model is even aware of.
It’s okay at subjective product judgements with limited context, and so the best engineers make the most important decisions themselves, constraining the model’s solution space to something looking like success.
Maintaining consistent progress towards a common goal with a bunch of different perspectives is the job.
I went to Amazon the other day and ordered a fully custom piece of software. I chatted with the seller about exactly what I wanted, what areas to focus on, and they ended up teaching me a thing or two about the domain. Very similar emotional experience to using a language model, which I’ve totally done before.
It is encrypted ciphertext rotated every 10m in lockstep with your Bluetooth identifier.
You will need to turn off your Bluetooth if you want to stop advertising a rotating random number.
The only difference with the contact tracing is that a key, on the device, can correlate the ciphertext. I have it off because the utility was never demonstrated.
Borderline useless? Is it just that the numbers are unit-less?
You can extract meaning from them! Find your current computer, find the target computer, calculate the percentage difference. 1000 is 1% better than 990, so it indeed doesn't mean anything at all.
On social media in China there is an oft-repeated joke that goes something like this: In other countries, governments intervene to prevent anti-competitive behaviour; here (in China), they intervene to curb competition.
- There is a chance, quantified by some metric, where a person is suggested a word that is offensive to them or their culture because a probabilistic model made the wrong decision.
- There is no chance that the above happens.
Apple will choose the latter, time and time again, because they are risk averse and freedom is not particularly high on their values list. We’re talking about the company that doesn’t let you type the Taiwanese flag in China, or the pride flag in Russia. It’s no surprise you’re not allowed to swipe “fuck” in the United States. I used to work at Apple.
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