When a scientist talked about meeting an investor in January, for example, Gmail offered the follow-up "do you want to meet him" -- not considering the possibility that the investor could be a woman.
The problem is a typical one with natural language generation systems like Google's: it's based on huge volumes of historical data. As certain fields tend to be dominated by people from one gender, the AI can sometimes assume that a person belongs to that gender.
If you're offended by how a computer looked at statistics and came to a likely conclusion, it's probally time take a step back and have a good think about why you're even offended.
If I were addressing someone whose gender I didn't know, I would just omit a gendered term rather than assume their gender. There's no reason a computer shouldn't do the same.
But if the AI has no information about the email recipient's individual gender, it's much safer for the AI to use the default pronoun (singular they) that English already has where we don't want to assume the gender of a particular person, or else for it to avoid the use of a pronoun.
If a person who is not a man works in a male-dominated field and gets mislabeled as a man, it just makes them feel out of place and unwelcome. Doubly so if the AI-generated words are attributed to an individual colleague who knows their actual gender but doesn't fully edit the suggestion before sending.
it's a computer that has zero concept of gender.
I don't think that being mistake for a different sex is even cause to be offended.
That person doesn't know and can only go only by what they have seen before.
In some case a program makes mistakes --> a simple solution is implemented.
As for your broader doubt that misgendering leads to offense, that's a longer conversation than I can shoehorn into this thread today, but the Geek Feminism wiki is one of several good places to which you can turn to start learning about that topic if you want to.
I'm a cisgender man myself, but I have heard enough personal stories from friends who aren't to know that misgendering can and often does offend.
Sure. They are just choosing not to make that fair assumption even though they could make a correct guess more often than not.
> If you're offended
I don't think it's about being offended. It's about reducing bias.
does this have any relevance? a variety of things could be a "fair assumption", but it's not like you must make some assumptions.
> you're offended
this seems reductive if not an outright strawman. in many ways, language is power, and being a little conscientious isn't going to end the world.