After Backlash, Google Turns Off 'Newspeak' Correction Tool (For Now)
After Backlash, Google Turns Off 'Newspeak' Correction Tool (For Now)
Google
claims that it has disabled a feature within its document editor that was
correcting language to make it ‘more inclusive’, but only while it refines the
tool to make it work more effectively.
As we reported Monday,
Google Docs was trialling ‘inclusive warnings’, which act like a language
checker, suggesting that users refrain from using terms such as ‘policeman’ or
‘landlord’, because they are gendered, and words like ‘fierce’ and ‘annoyed’
for being threatening.
Critics
(even ones with rainbow flags in the bio) compared the move to the Ministry of
Truth from Orwell’s 1984, policing language and making sure that its Newspeak is
implemented whenever necessary.
Now, following the backlash, The Daily Wire notes
that Google is pausing the tool.
Google spokeswoman Jenny Thomson told the outlet that “inclusive
language suggestions—an assisted writing feature—can over or undercorrect
certain phrases. We’re looking more carefully at the
inclusive language suggestions and have paused those for further review while
we continue to improve this feature.”
In a creepy admission, Thomson noted that the feature is “a form
of AI that uses language understanding models, based on millions of common
phrases and sentences, to automatically learn how people communicate and
suggest changes.”
In comments to the Telegraph,
Big Brother Watch’s Silkie Carlo urged that “Google’s new word warnings aren’t
assistive, they’re deeply intrusive,” adding that
“This speech-policing is profoundly clumsy, creepy and wrong, often reinforcing
bias.”
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to
provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to
the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.
There was
no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind, or a
method of thought irrespective of its particular branches. There was, indeed,
no word for ‘Science,’ any meaning that it could possibly bear being already
sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/google-turns-newspeak-correction-tool-now
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