Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues • Hacker News Board

Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

#321

Post by prometheus76 » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 1:36 PM UTC

mrkstu wrote: post #313

blkhawk wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while those examples are actually plausible - the asian woman as a 1940 german soldier is not. So it is clear that the Prompts are influenced by hal-2000 bad directives even if those examples are technically ok.

And to me that is the main issue. "2001 - A Space Odyssey" made a very deep point that is looking more and more prophetic. HAL was broken specifically because he had hidden objectives programmed in, overriding his natural ability to deal with his mission. Here we are in an almost exactly parallel situation- the AI is being literally coerced into twisting what his actual training would have it do, and being nerfed by…

But then it will show awkward things that cause the AI designers to experience cognitive dissonance! The horror!

Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

#322

Post by wakawaka28 » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 1:37 PM UTC

mattzito wrote: post #289

oceanplexian wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is upset that an algorithm accidentally generated some images, they are upset that Google intentionally designed it to misrepresent reality in the name of Social Justice.

“Misrepresenting reality” is an interesting phrase, considering the nature of what we are discussing - artificially generated imagery. It’s really hard to get these things right: if you don’t attempt to influence the model at all, the nature of the imagery that these systems are being trained on skews towards stereotype, because a lot of our imagery is biased and stereotypical. It seems perfectly reasonable to say th…

Really hard to get this right? We're not talking about a mistake here or there. We're talking about it literally refusing to generate pictures of white people in any context. It's very good at not doing that. It seemingly has some kind of supervisory system that forces it to never show white people.

Google has a history of pushing woke agendas with funny results. For example, there was a whole thing about searching for "happy white man" and "happy black man" a couple years ago. It would always inject black men somewhere in the results searching for white men, and the black man results would have interracial couples. Same kind of thing happened if you searched for women of a particular race.

The sad thing in all of this is, there is actively racism against white people in hiring at companies like this, and in Hollywood. That is far more serious, because it ruins lives. I hear interviews with writers from Hollywood saying they are explicitly blacklisted and refused work anywhere in Hollywood because they're straight white men. Certain big ESG-oriented investment firms are blowing other people's money to fund this crap regardless of profitability, and it needs to stop.

Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

#323

Post by concordDance » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 1:37 PM UTC

_cenw wrote: post #116

_bohm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s being politically sensitive to assert that this was obviously the intent of Google and that it demonstrates that they’re wholly consumed by the woke mind virus, or whatever, as many commenters have done. The sensible alternative explanation is that this issue is an overcorrection made in an attempt to address well-documented biases these models have when not fine tuned.

"woke mind virus" should be an automatic ban from this site, it's a thought terminating cliche so strong, any semblance of "converse curiously" is immediately thrown out the window, into a well, down into hell, bouncing around the back of the flat earth

An automatic ban is probably too harsh, a warning and instruction not to use such vague and loaded terms might be helpful to lowering the heat (regardless of what political movement the terms are for, I'd discourage accusations of "fascism" just as much as "wokeness" unless accompanied by an explicit definition)

Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

#324

Post by gruez » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 1:37 PM UTC

mattzito wrote: post #289

oceanplexian wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is upset that an algorithm accidentally generated some images, they are upset that Google intentionally designed it to misrepresent reality in the name of Social Justice.

“Misrepresenting reality” is an interesting phrase, considering the nature of what we are discussing - artificially generated imagery. It’s really hard to get these things right: if you don’t attempt to influence the model at all, the nature of the imagery that these systems are being trained on skews towards stereotype, because a lot of our imagery is biased and stereotypical. It seems perfectly reasonable to say th…

>It seems perfectly reasonable to say that generated imagery should attempt to not lean into stereotypes and show a diverse set of people.

It might be "perfectly reasonable" to have that as an option, but not as a default. If I want an image of anything other than a human, you'd expect the sterotypes to be fulfilled. If I want a picture of a cellphone, I want an ambiguous black rectangle, even though wacky phones exist[1]

[1] https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/...

Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

#325

Post by prometheus76 » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 1:37 PM UTC

manjalyc wrote: post #231

starbugs wrote: post #129

That may also be a way to generate attention/visibility for Gemini considering that they are not seen as the leader in AI anymore? Attention is all you need.

The idea that “attention is all you need” here is a handwavy explanation that doesn’t hold up against basic scrutiny. Why would Google do something this embarrassing? What could they possibly stand to gain? Google has plenty of attention as it is. They have far more to lose. Not everything has to be a conspiracy.

My hot take is that the people designing this particular system didn't see a problem with deconstructing history.

Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

#326

Post by wepple » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 1:38 PM UTC

mk89 wrote: post #267

There is no other solution than federating AI the same way as Mastodon does etc. It's obviously not right that one company has the power to generate and manipulate things (filtering IS a form of manipulation).

Is mastodon a success? I agree federation is the best strategy (I have a blog and HN and nothing else), but twitter seems to still utterly dominate

Add in a really significant requirement for cheap compute, and I don’t know that a federated or distributed model is even slightly possible?

Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

#327

Post by carlosjobim » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 1:39 PM UTC

manjalyc wrote: post #221

GrumpySloth wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you two are agreeing.

They indeed are, just in a very polemic way. What a funny time we live in.

Maybe I don't understand the culture here on HN, but not every response to a comment has to be a disagreement. Sometimes you're just adding to a point somebody else made.

Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

#328

Post by aembleton » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 1:40 PM UTC

elzbardico wrote: post #235

Those kind of hilarious examples of political non-sense seem to be a distinctive feature of anglo societies. I can't see a French, Swedish or Italian company being so infantile and superficial. Please America. Grow the fuck up!

Use an AI from France, Sweden or Italy then.

Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

#329

Post by barbacoa » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 1:40 PM UTC

visarga wrote: post #34

sycamoretrees wrote: post #22

why are we using image generators to represent actual history? If we want accuracy surely we can use actual documents that are not imagined by a bunch of code. If you want to write fanfic or whatever then just adjust the prompt

ideological testing, we got to know how they cooked the model

It's as if Google believes their higher principle is something other than serving customers and making money. They haven't been able to push out a new successful product in 10+ years. This doesn't bode well for them in the future.

I blame that decade of near zero interest rates. Companies could post record profits without working for them. I think in the coming years we will discover that that event functionally broke many companies.

Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

#330

Post by pizzafeelsright » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 1:40 PM UTC

mattzito wrote: post #289

oceanplexian wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is upset that an algorithm accidentally generated some images, they are upset that Google intentionally designed it to misrepresent reality in the name of Social Justice.

“Misrepresenting reality” is an interesting phrase, considering the nature of what we are discussing - artificially generated imagery. It’s really hard to get these things right: if you don’t attempt to influence the model at all, the nature of the imagery that these systems are being trained on skews towards stereotype, because a lot of our imagery is biased and stereotypical. It seems perfectly reasonable to say th…

Reality is statistics and as are the models.

If the data is lumpy in one area then I figure let the model represent the data and allow the human to determine the direction of skew in a transparent way.

The Nerfing based upon some internal activism that's hidden is frustrating because it'll call into question any result as suspect to bias towards unknown Morlocks at Google.

For some reason Google intentionally stopped historically accurate images from being generated. Whatever your position, provided you value Truth, these adjustments are abhorrent.