Because there is no longer him’s and her’s, only ze/hir/hirs/hirself and ze/zir/zirs/zirself…
Gmail’s Smart Composecan save you valuable time when you’re firing off a quick message, but don’t expect it to refer to people as “him” or “her” — Google is playing it safe on that front. Product leaders haverevealedtoReuters that Google removed gender pronouns from Smart Compose’s phrase suggestions after realizing that the AI-guided feature could be biased. 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.
Google pulls gender pronouns from Gmail Smart Compose to reduce bias
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.