Incident 177: Google’s Assistive Writing Feature Provided Allegedly Unnecessary and Clumsy Suggestions

Description: 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.

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Alleged: Google Docs developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Google Docs users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
177
Report Count
5
Incident Date
2022-04-19
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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