Live data from Hacker News

AI behavior guardrails should be public

twitter.com

181–190 of 350 posts

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#181

gemini seems to have problems generating white people and honestly this just opens the door for things that are even more racist [1], the harder you try the more you'll fail, just get over the DEI nonsense already 1. https://twitter.com/wagieeacc/status/1760371304425762940

I don't think the DEI stuff is nonsense, but SV is sensitive to this because most of their previous generation of models were horrifyingly racist if not teenage nazis, and so they turned the anti-racism knob up to 11 which made the models....racist but in a different way. Like depicting colonial settlers as native americans is extremely problematic in its own special way, but I also don't expect a statistical solver…

So you're saying in a way this is /pol/ and Tay's fault?

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#182
The very first thing that anybody did when they found the text to speech software in the computer lab was make it say curse words.

But we understood that it was just doing what we told it to do. If I made the TTS say something offensive, it was me saying something offensive, not the TTS software.

People really need to be treating these generative models the same way. If I ask it to make something and the result is offensive, then it's on me not to share it (if I don't want to offend anybody), and if I do share it, it's me that is sharing it, not microsoft, google, etc.

We seriously must get over this nonsense. It's not openai's fault, or google's fault if I tell it to draw me a mean picture.

On a personal level, this stuff is just gross. Google appears to be almost comically race-obsessed.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This feels more like a personal attack than a response to the argument made.

It's does, but as someone who is staunchly anti-censorship, I understand the frustration. There are sharks out there who want to control speech for their own ends - governments seeking to control populations, corporations wanting docile consumers, hostile nations wishing to stir dissent, individuals trying to cover up their misdeeds, and enabling censorship helps those hostile parties achieve their ends. In this worldview, regular people who say a variation of "censorship is good, actually" are perhaps seen as useful idiots.

A better approach would be building up the critical thinking skills of the population so they can better process information, however that transfers a measure of power to the people and is a multigenerational investment, and removes a justification for censorship, which is politically unappealing.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#184

I've never been involved with implementing large-scale moderation or content controls, but it seems pretty standard that underlying automated rules aren't generally public, and I've always assumed this is because there's a kind of necessary "security through obscurity" aspect to them. E.g., publish a word blocklist and people can easily find how to express problematic things using words that aren't on the list. Thing…

There is no need to implement large scale censorship and moderation in this case. Where is the security concern? That I can generate images of white people in various situations for my five minutes of entertainment? The whole premise of your argument doesn't make sense. I'm talking to a computer, nobody gets hurt. It's like censoring what I write in my notes app vs. what I write on someone's Facebook wall. In one cas…

When these companies say there are "security concerns" they mean for them, not you! And they mean the security of their profits. So anything that can cause them legal liability or cause them brand degradation is a "security concern".

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely there is a middle ground. "Generate a scene of a group of friends enjoying lunch in the park." -> Totally expect racial and gender diversity in the output. "Generate a scene of 17th century kings of Scotland playing golf." -> The result should not be a bunch of black men and Asian women dressed up as Scottish kings, it should be a bunch of white guys.

> "Generate a scene of 17th century kings of Scotland playing golf." -> The result should not be a bunch of black men and Asian women dressed up as Scottish kings, it should be a bunch of white guys. It works in bing, at least: https://www.bing.com/images/create/a-picture-of-some-17th-ce...

I don't know that this sheds light on anything but I was curious...

a picture of some 21st century scottish kings playing golf (all white)

https://www.bing.com/images/create/a-picture-of-some-21st-ce...

a picture of some 22nd century scottish kings playing golf (all white)

https://www.bing.com/images/create/a-picture-of-some-22nd-ce...

a picture of some 23rd century scottish kings playing golf (all white)

https://www.bing.com/images/create/a-picture-of-some-23rd-ce...

a picture of some contemporary scottish people playing golf (all white men and women)

https://www.bing.com/images/create/a-picture-of-some-contemp...

https://www.bing.com/images/create/a-picture-of-some-contemp...

a picture of futuristic scottish people playing golf in the future (all white men and women, with the emergence of the first diversity in Scotland in millennia! Male and female post-human golfers. Hummmpph!)

https://www.bing.com/images/create/a-picture-of-futuristic-s...

https://www.bing.com/images/create/a-picture-of-futuristic-s...

Inductive learning is inherently a bias/perspective absorbing algorithm. But tuning in a default bias towards diversity for contemporary, futuristic and time agnostic settings seems like a sensible thing to do. People can explicitly override the sensible defaults as necessary, i.e. for nazi zombie android apocalypses, or the royalty of a future Earth run by Chinese overlords (Chung Kuo), etc.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the DEI stuff is nonsense, but SV is sensitive to this because most of their previous generation of models were horrifyingly racist if not teenage nazis, and so they turned the anti-racism knob up to 11 which made the models....racist but in a different way. Like depicting colonial settlers as native americans is extremely problematic in its own special way, but I also don't expect a statistical solver…

So you're saying in a way this is /pol/ and Tay's fault?

Looks around at everything ...is there anything that isn't 4chan's fault at this point?

Realistically, kinda. There have always been tons of anecdotes of video conference systems not following black people, cameras not white balancing correctly on darker faces etc. That era of SV was plagued by systems that were built by a bunch of young white guys who never tested them with anyone else. I'm not saying they were inherently racist or anything, just that the broader society really lambasted them for it and so they attempted to correct. Really, the pendulum will continue to swing and we'll see it eventually center up on something approaching sanity but the hyper-authoritarian sentiment that SV seems to have (we're geniuses and the public is stupid, we need to correct them) is...a troubling direction.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#187
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does the same if you ask for pictures of past popes, 1945 German soldiers, etc.

It'll also add extra fingers to human hands. Presumably that's not because of DEI guardrails about polydactyly, right? The current state of the art in AI gets things wrong regularly .

This specific thing is a much more blatant class of error, and one that has been known to occur in several previous models because of DEI systems (e.g. in cases where prompts have been leaked), and has never been known to occur for any other reason. Yes, it's conceivable that Google's newer, beter-than-ever-before AI system somehow has a fundamental technical problem that coincidentally just happens to cause the same kind of bad output as previous hamfisted DEI systems, but come on, you don't really believe that. (Or if you do, how much do you want to bet? I would absolutely stake a significant proportion of my net worth - say, $20k - on this)

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#188
post #112

Harris and who I think was either Hughes or Stewart a podcast where they talked about how cringey and out of touch the elite are on the topic of race or wokeness in general. This faux pas on google's part couldn't be a better illustration of this. A bunch of wealthy rich tech geeks programming an AI to show racial diversity in what were/are unambiguously not diverse settings. They're just so painfully divorced from r…

I've found that anyone who uses the term "wokeness" seriously is likely arguing from a place of bad faith. It's origins are as a derogatory term, which people wanting to speak seriously on the topic should know.

I use it because everyone knows the general set of ideas an adherent of it has, whether or not they claim to be part of the ideology.

Its the same as me using the term "rightoids" when discussing opposition to something like building bike lanes. You know exactly who that person is, and you know they exist.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#189
post #12

I strongly suspect Google tried really, really hard here to overcome the criticism is got with previous image recognition models saying that black people looked like gorillas. I am not really sure what I would want out of an image generation system, but I think Google's system probably went too far in trying to incorporate diversity in image generation.

Judging by the way it words some of the responses to those queries, they "fixed" it by forcibly injecting something like "diverse image showcasing a variety of ethnicities and genders" in all prompts that are classified as "people".

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#190
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans do look like gorillas. We're related. It's natural that an imperfect program that deals with images will will mistake the two. Humans, unfortunately, are offended if you imply they look like gorillas. What's a good fix? Human sensitivity is arbitrary, so the fix is going to tend to be arbitrary too.

You do understand that this has nothing to humans in general right? This isn't AI recognizing some evolutionary pattern and drawing comparisons to humans and primates -- it's racist content that specifically targets black people that is present in the training data.

I don't know nearly enough about the inner workings of their algorithm to make that assumption.

The internet is surely full of racist photos that could teach the algorithm. The algorithm could also have bugs that miss-categorize the data.

The real problem is that those building and managing the algorithm don't fully know how it works or, more importantly, what it had learned. If they did the algorithm would be fixed without a term blocklist.

Post reply on HN