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AI behavior guardrails should be public

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Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#211
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.

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.

> 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.

Do we expect this because diverse groups are realistically most common or because we wish that they were? For example only some 10% of marriages are interracial, but commercials on TV would lead you to believe it’s 30% or higher. The goal for commercials of course is to appeal to a wide audience without alienating anyone, not to reflect real world stats.

What’s the goal for an image generator or a search engine? Depends who is using it and for what, so you can’t ever make everyone happy with one system unless you expose lots of control surface toggles. Those toggles could help users “own” output more, but generally companies wouldn’t want to expose them because it could shed light on proprietary backends, or just take away the magic from interacting with the electric oracles.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#212
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is bad actors who think porn or racism are intolerable in any form, who will publish mountains of articles condemning your chatbot for producing such things, even if they had to go out of their way to break the guardrails to make it do so. They will create boycotts against you, they will lobby government to make your life harder, they will petition payment processors and cloud service providers to not wor…

But I can find porn and racism using Google search right now, how is that different? You have to disable their filters, but you can find it. Why is there no such thing for the google generation bots, I don't see why it would be so much worse here?

It's not fundamentally different. It's just not making that big of a headline because Google search isn't "new and exciting". But to give you some examples:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-19/google-qu...

https://ischool.uw.edu/news/2022/02/googles-ceo-image-search...

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta love such a high quality fix. When your upper high tech, state of the art algorithm learns racist patterns just blocklist the word and move on. Don't worry about why it learned such patterns in the first place.

[flagged]

Do we have enough info for to say that decisively?

Ideally we would see the training data, though its probably reasonable to assume a random collection of internet content includes racist imagery. My understanding, though, is that the algorithm and the model of data learned is still a black box that people can't parse and understand.

How would we know for sure racist output is due to the racist input, rather than a side effect of some part of the training or querying algorithms?

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#214

Human's obsession with race is so weird, and now we're projecting that on AIs.

… for example, I wanted to generate an avatar for myself; to that end, I want it to be representative of me. I had a rather difficult time with this; even explicit prompts of "use this skin color" with variations of the word "white" (ivory, fair, etc.) got me output of a black person with dreads. I can't use this result: at best it feels inauthentic, at worst, appropriation. I appreciate the apparent diversity in its…

For cases like this, you just need to convince it that it would be inappropriate to generate anything that does not follow your instructions. Mention how you are planning to use it as an avatar and it would be inappropriate/cultural appropriation for it to deviate.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#215

It's super easy to run LLMs and Stable Diffusion locally -- and it'll do what you ask without lecturing you. If you have a beefy machine (like a Mac Studio) your local LLMs will likely run faster than OpenAI or Gemini. And you get to choose what models work best for you. Check out LM Studio which makes it super easy to run LLMs locally. AUTOMATIC1111 makes it simple to run Stable Diffusion locally. I highly recommend…

You are correct. Lm studio kind of works, but one still has to know the lingo and know what kind of model to download. The websites are not beginner friendly. I haven't heard of automatic1111.

You probably did, but under the name "stable-diffusion-webui".

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want large tech companies "creating reality" on behalf of everyone else? They're not even democratic institutions that we vote on. You trust they will get it right? Our benevolent super rich overlords.

Its not really a question about want, its a question about facts. Their actions will make a significant mark on the future. So far it seems like they are trying to promote positive changes such as inclusion and equality. Which is far far far fucking really infinitely far better than trying to promote exclusion and inequality

Can you please explain how outright refusing to draw an image with from the prompt "white male scientist", and instead giving a lecture on how their race is irrelevant to their occupation, but then happily drawing the requested image when prompted for "black female scientist", is promoting inclusion and equality?

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#217
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> has never been known to occur for any other reason Of course it has. Again, these things regularly give humans extra fingers and arms. They don't even know what humans fundamentally look like . On the flip side, humans are shitty at recognizing bias. This comment thread stems from someone complaining the AI only rarely generated white people, but that's statistically accurate . It feels biased to someone in a major…

> Of course it has. Again, these things regularly give humans extra fingers and arms. They don't even know what humans fundamentally look like.

> This comment thread stems from someone complaining the AI only rarely generated white people, but that's statistically accurate. It feels biased to someone in a majority-white nation with majority-white friends and coworkers, but it fundamentally isn't.

So the AI is simultaneously too dumb to figure out what humans look like, but also so super smart that it uses precisely accurate racial proportions when generating people (not because it's been specifically adjusted to, but naturally)? Bullshit.

> I don't doubt that there are some attempts to get LLMs to go outside the "white westerner" bubble in training sets and prompts. I suspect the extent of it is also deeply exaggerated by those who like to throw around woke-this and woke-that as derogatories.

You're dodging the question. Do you actually believe the reason that the last example in the article looks very much not like a man is a deep technical issue, or a DEI initiative? If the former, how much are you willing to bet? If the latter, why are you throwing out these insincere arguments?

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#218
post #83

Bing also generates political propaganda (guess of what side) if you ask it to generate images with the prompt "person holding a sign that says" without any further content. https://twitter.com/knn20000/status/1712562424845599045 https://twitter.com/ramonenomar/status/1722736169463750685 https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/1ao1avd/why_did_thi... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/1ao1avd/why_did_thi...

It doesn't need to be intentionally "generating propaganda". Their old diversity-by-appending-ethnicity system could easily lead to "a sign that says Black", which could then be filled in with "a sign that says Black Lives Matter", which is probably represented quite well in their training data.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#219

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.

> 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. Do we expect this because diverse groups are realistically most common or because we wish that they were? For example only some 10% of marriages are interracial, but commercials on TV would lead you to believe it’s 30% or higher. The goal for commercials…

And most women are friends with mostly women, and most men are friends with mostly men.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#220

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…

This is simply a bad approach and a bad argument. Security through obscurity is a term whose only usage in security circles is derogatory. People figure out how to get around these auto-censors just fine, and not publishing them creates more problems for legitimate users and more plausible deniability for bad policy hidden in them. Doing the same thing but with public policy would already be better, albeit still bad.

The only real solution to the problem of there being an enormous public square controlled by private corporations is to end this situation

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