Ryan J. Salva: evaluation

Transcript context

…Oh, I love that. Just kind of creating a persona of the thing to help you inform how the behavior of the thing should work. How do you work through these challenges? Is it discussions with you and the legal team? I don't know, these ethical things are really tricky, I imagine. How do you approach them like that as a product team? It is conversations with a very, very wide cast of characters. This product in particular, I probably spent more time with legal than any other products that I've ever kind of been responsible for. All wonderful creative people. But it's not just legal. It is also privacy and security champions. It is, frankly, developers, like the people who are using it, listening to them. Hey, what works here? What doesn't work for you here? Why is this offensive? Why is it not offensive? We'll continue on the example of the crazy pair programmer whispering crazy things into our year. When we first started out, we didn't really have any filter on Copilot whatsoever the very, very, very early days. And then eventually we're like, okay, it needs to be slightly more controlled experience. We need to edit out some of the most egregious stuff. We introduced a simple block list of words, and these block lists are always fraught with peril, like which words are okay, which words are not okay. All of a sudden, we become editors of language and that's kind of a scary place to be. I'm not comfortable with it at least. But at a certain level, it has to be done, because otherwise you're going to create a bad developer experience. Often we would get feedback from developers of like, "Hey, this particular word was blocked. That it was blocked either was offensive to me or prevented me from being able to get good value out of the product." Oh man.…

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