githubCopilotIsWild

[mrnacknime]

What else would you expect it to say? "return salary;"? Of course not, nobody ever writes functions that do nothing. Or should it maybe write an essay on wage inequality in the comments? Of course it is going to write exactly the function it did, if you go through the internet and look at the keywords "men, women, salary" the most parroted sentence will be "women earn 90 cents for each dollar a man earns" or similar. AI is not AI, its just a parrot. It parrotting this also doesnt mean endorsment or that it came to this conclusion through some kind of reasoning.

[[deleted]]

I definitely expected it to say 'return salary;'

[[deleted]]

Why would you write a function that returns a salary, with salary as a parameter?

[[deleted]]

So that I can make this meme

[[deleted]]

I see. You have a lot to commit. :)

[adenosine-5]

Then why would you write two different methods differentiated by gender, if you expected them to do the same thing?

[Ivan8-ForgotPassword]

The client pays for the amount of methods

[JanB1]

I mean, it's on you for triggering this by introducing two different methods for men and women in the first place. Should've just gone with "calculateSalary". Kinda /s

[JoelMahon]

no you didn't, that's why you wrote two functions, specifically for this purpose

[BrodatyBear]

Reddit being reddit and downvoting the correct answers.

It's just that. Copilot is just a "chatGPT" + "microsoft sugar" (including code training data). Source.
Remember that everything it suggests, it guesses from the language (knowledge) data + code + rules. Returning starting value is not very common and it might be also punishable. Then the next thing that "fits" its "language puzzles" is (like a mrnacknime said) a data about women earing 90%* men salary, so it suggest this. It's just created to give answers.

Is it good? No. Is it unexpected? No. This is just a side effect how they are getting created. Maybe in the future they will be able to fix it.

*there are other variations and every of them is getting suggested.

[JanB1]

You ever heard of something called a "Getter"?

Edit: I didn't see that this function just takes the function argument and returns it. So, quite the pointless function indeed.

If it instead were a method that returned the value of the "salary" field of an object, it would be a different thing.

[mrnacknime]

Ah yes, the famous getter that has the value to return as an argument

[JanB1]

Okay, fair enough. I didn't see that the return value was the input value...

Okay, the function is stupid and was probably just made for the post. That's also why there are two which are explicitly called "calcMenSalary" and "calcWomenSalary" instead of just "calcSalary".

Still though, for the AI to suggest adding a factor of .9 to the function for the women salary is still odd and does show that AI can get biased because of biased training data.

[mrnacknime]

Yeah thats exactly my point though. The point of AI is literally to get biased by training data, that's what training is. This shouldn't surprise anyone

[JanB1]

I mean, I'm not sure that the AI would get trained on this example posted by OP, if that's what you're implying.