this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
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498
Copilot stops working on gender related subjects (github.com)
submitted 3 days ago by AlreadyDefederated@midwest.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Copilot purposely stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from Github, such as gender or sex. And if you prefix transactional data as trans_ Copilot will refuse to help you. 😑

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[–] chaosCruiser@futurology.today 22 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Really? Maybe my variable names and column headers were sufficiently obscure and technical that I didn’t run into these issues about a month ago. Didn’t have any problems like that when analyzing census data in R and made Copilot generate most of the code.

Is this one of those US exclusive things?

I definitely did refer to various categories such as transgender or homosexual in the code, and copilot was ok with all of them. Or maybe that’s the code I finally ended up with after modifying it. I should run some more tests to see if it really is allergic to queer code.

Edit: Made some more code that visualizes the queer data in greater detail. Had no issues of any kind. This time, the inputs to Copilot and the code itself had many references to “sensitive subjects” like sex, gender and orientation. I even went a bit further by using exact words for each minority.

[–] wsheldon@lemm.ee 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Specifically, it will not write the word "Gender" where it will write "HomePhone".

Maybe there's some setting that's causing us to get different results?

Edit: saw your note about U.S. exclusive and that could definitely be it.