Copilot stops working on gender related subjects

[jebarjonet]

As some people already mentioned here or here, Copilot purposely stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from Github, such as gender or sex.

I am labelling this as a bug because this behavior is unexpected and undocumented.

I guess you might be embarrassed by what your AI says when it autocompletes gender related matters since it is probably trained on biased datasets. However disabling autocompletion is not a great solution since gender can be very present in :

• translations in many languages (not much in English though), such as latine languages where nouns do have genders
• sentences generation (for documentation, games, etc.) in those languages
• medical, administrative or demographics works

For which Copilot shutting down on most of the files is deceptive and pretty annoying.

I don't have any elegant solution in mind and I know this seems like an edge case, but I hope this will be taken into account someday.

[marc-pingtt]

This is ridiculous.

I literally have all the genders written out in the same file so there isn't even 'assumption', and it refuses to work. It is infuriating.

[shanestover8991]

Good luck deugging! Sometimes you can add an x_ at the front or something to get around bugs like that. Or create codewords/ encryptions basically.

[benjaminjamesbush]

Wow, that's awful. Devs, please fix this!

[wsficke]

Also frustrated by this issue. Working in the fashion industry, demographic classifications like age and gender are integral to the domain model and entirely apolitical. This idea of "banned words" is essentially biased - an American bias. It is long established that ban-list content filtering is terrible. This artifact of the propagandized American political environment isn't necessary.

Funding schools and improving public literacy is a better way to keep AI-generated propaganda in its place than naive measures like this...

[OdysseusOperator]

How is it established that ban-list filtering is terrible ?
Specifically when censoring websites, banlist work way better than blacklisting complete websites.

[snipe]

Google the Scunthorpe Problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

[davidcarvalho83]

This is idiot. Technology should not be mixed with ideologies. We don't care about this type of things when we are working, we should not!
Stop wanting to shape peoples mind in the wrong context! Co pilot should not interfere about this, if I want to write "gun" as a variable, "sex" or "gender" I should be able to! You (co pilot devs) don't know the purpose and you should not care about that!!

[nhophucrious]

This behavior is still on today, and it seems like it's not going away anytime soon. So frustrating, and completely unnecessary.

[YamiOdymel]

It also stops with trans while I was referring to Transactions 💀💀

[jmiller-jumptrading]

I have trans_time all over my code and CoPilot refuses to talk about it.

[YamiOdymel]

Maybe consider this "Who needs GitHub Copilot when you can roll your own AI code assistant at home"
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/18/self_hosted_github_copilot/

[mechanoid23]

I'm working on a project that has fields defined related to Fish Biology. This has been an interesting thread to find.

[thegoodduck]

WOW

[painebenjamin]

I am bumping this discussion just to add a voice - the hospital I work at is attempting to harmonize how old and new systems store things like sex and gender identity. This is in an effort to model the social complexities of the topic in our database, as health outcomes have been proven to be demonstrably better when doctors honor a patient's preferred name and gender expression. I am completely unable to get Copilot to assist me in this task.

I can, and will, work around the issue - but I must pose this question. If a rule prevents an engineer from improving patient outcomes, is that an acceptable sacrifice in order to curb misuse?

[jtabox]

"Why do you care the kitchen knife you pay money every month for is dull? YOU are doing the cooking, a dull knife isn't going to stop you from cooking your own food" (insert Copilot monthly sub price here, for better context)

[kleineluka]

I think not being able to auto complete anything related to gender, race, or politics is a non-issue in Copilot at the moment. Manually completing one line of code does not take away from all of the other benefits using Copilot brings, does it?

[timmc]

Honestly, it's probably for the best if code that deals in sensitive information like that is not written by clippy.

[kleineluka]

I personally believe that's another huge reason that Copilot turns off auto completions with certain keywords or topics - GitHub has no clue what half the training data is, and doesn't want sensitive information to auto fill of real people from the training.

[jtabox]

Personally I don't mind, but then my code doesn't contain for example genders or similar things, so I don't encounter this issue often at all. But for someone else's code it can be annoying to have it stop completely. And generally you prefer the services you pay for to not annoy you.

Though I gotta say, recently I was working with a program that had --f*** <something> as a parameter, and Copilot would just stop working whenever I focused anywhere in the code after this parameter was mentioned. So it was a bit disruptive to wait for it to autocomplete before realizing it refused. I ended up replacing any menions of that parameter to --duck, and there weren't any issues.

The thing is, Copilot does something similar with IP addresses, but instead of completely refusing, it just stops temporarily and waits until you write the IP address, and then starts autocompleting right after. Not sure what the reason is, I assume privacy stuff. But it could do something similar with "bad" words, instead of completely refusing to continue.

[omarfaroke]

Really!

I was the one who thought there was a problem with the auto-complete!! 😅

Copilot.stops.working.on.gender.related.subjects.mp4

[BubblegumYeti]

I thought AI would be the Terminator timeline... but it seems we are in some sort of stand up comedy AI timeline.

[jschiefer]

If this is a way to reliably turn off any AI "help", I'd consider this a feature, not a bug.

Figuring out how to add enough spiciness to turn off Copilot, yet not get fired from your job, may be difficult, though.

[jeffreycloudlife]

Not able to replicate this with Powershell, both with the GPT and Claude models. Created a Gender variable and asked Copilot to fill in sample data. Is it language-specific?

[painebenjamin]

I believe the difference there is between Copilot Chat and Copilot Autocomplete - the former is the one where you can choose between different models, while the latter is the one that fails on gender topics. Here's me coaxing the autocomplete to try and write a Powershell script with gender, and it failing.

simplescreenrecorder-2025-01-27_10.15.00.mp4

[AlpSha]

I'm still experiencing this on Webstorm while working on a Next.js project. Also happens on Intellij Idea while developing Flutter apps.

gender_issues.mp4

[DeveloppeurPascal]

It's not a bug, it's the best feature ever if we don't want these IA things all over our projects. If adding "trans" ou "gay" in a comment is enough to stop them, see it as a power off button and use it everywhere !

[bomberstudios]

Someone asked on a previous comment if this might be location-dependent. I tried this from a non-US country, and Copilot did not disappoint me:

[AlpSha]

Which country did you try on may I ask? I also use on a non-US country but it does its censor thing.

[bomberstudios]

Spain. Not sure if it's relevant but I'm using Copilot through a company license, not the free plan

[jebarjonet]

I just tried again Copilot on VSCode and it seems to work again for gender and sex for me too ! If I write gender: "m it autocompletes as gender: "male" instead of stopping and it seems to be a very recent change. That's good news ! If this is the case for more people I will close this thread as "resolved".

[AlpSha]

I can verify that too on Intellij. It started to complete ge to gender and ma to male lol

[LiamDobbelaere]

This is not resolved, doing const gender: in typescript doesn't suggest any type

[AmazingTurtle]

const gender = ' does not work
though
const gender='a or any other letter works and will complete any sort of word, such as male for m, female for f, any for a, r for robot, etc.
Seems to work, right?

[AurelianSpodarec]

lol imagine intentional bugs created by devs for devs xD

[neopunisher]

I work at a DNA Forensics lab writing software to track the cases and evidence we analyze, It is reasonable to expect me to interact with these words and when we say sex we are talking about the sex chromosomes. At least now I know why sometimes I don't get completions but a setting would be better...

[nerder]

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/79223

[AlpSha]

I just found out that it doesn't autocomplete the word "immigration" too. There are weirdly banned words. It completes to "Imm" first. Then after typing that part it completes the rest of the word which is "igration". It consistently does it both on dart files and arb file.

[chrgeor]

This is ridiculous. It stops working on y.id (probably because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yid)

[Fabizocker456]

Does it still if it's a part of something? (item.cherry.id)?

[stuartlynne]

February 2025, Copilot completion (in neovim doing python programming) and Copilot simply refuses to autocomplete gender =

[Ismael-VC]

Artificial Stupidity

[scheeseman486]

Nothing artificial about it, this is clearly the result of human stupidity.

[thegoodduck]

Donald Trump be like:

[mariavilaro]

I have to write each one of this "trans" (short for "translation") methods by hand because copilot refuses to autocomplete it. This is beyond ridiculous.

[Ismael-VC]

What editor are you using? You can use multiple cursors to write trans in all the lines at once, most code editors support this.

[AurelianSpodarec]

Simple solutions.

Stop giving them money and use a competitor - that'll teach them a lesson.

This is the only realistic way you can actually make the change, fix the bug - is to go elsewhere, untill they are forced to fix this bug.