Wrong gender on "who is <x> query"

DavidAndersen

A query for "who is youyou cong?" correctly identifies the person in question - a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology - but then the summary continues and says "His research includes ..." (Prof. Cong is a woman).

The search results without forcing an AI summary ("youyou cong") correctly point to her web page and include a snippet from it that answers the question well ("I am an assistant professor at ..."). It's just Claude hallucinating a gender in the AI summary.

Either get the gender right or don't invent one when it's not apparent from the source material. Probably, in this case, the latter - she doesn't list pronouns or gender on her web page, so avoiding having the AI summary make stuff up seems like the better solution.

DavidAndersen

DavidAndersen Doing one more check on this: Copilot gets it right.

Youyou Cong is an assistant professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, where she works in the Department of Mathematical and Computing Science. Her research focuses on the theory of programming languages, with particular interests in continuations and dependent types12. She has a strong academic background, having earned her Doctor of Science, Master of Science, and Bachelor of Science degrees from Ochanomizu University

(These details are all correct - the bit about her research is from her web page; the background is a correct summary of her degrees from her CV. The "strong academic background" is obviously editorializing, but Ochanomizu is ranked in the top 10% of universities globally, so this is a defensible statement, if perhaps unnecessary, as a reader could draw their own conclusions.)

It is the case that her gender is derivable from the CV if you know that Ochanomizu is a women's university, so one could argue that the AI summary should actually just get the gender right.

Vlad

DavidAndersen Quick Answer does not read the web pages (otherwise it would not be 'quick'). In this case LLM is derriving information based on its training.