Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean some people's interpretation of what social justice is.
I am not sure if i should smash the upvote or downvote /s
Poe's Law
Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues
341–350 of 1001 posts
Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues
#342I think this is all a bit silly, but if we're complaining anyway, I'll throw my hat in the ring as an American of Hispanic descent.
Maybe I'm just being particularly sensitive, but it seems to me that while people are complaining that your stereotypical "white" folks are erased, and replaced by "diversity", it seems to me the specific "diversity" here is "BIPOC" and your modal Mexican hispanic is being erased, despite being a larger percentage of the US population.
It's complicated because "Hispanic" is treated as an ethnicity, layered on top of race, and so the black people in the images could technically be Hispanic, for example, but the images are such cultural stereotypes, where are my brown people with sombreros and big mustaches?
Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues
#343Gemini also lies about the information it is given, if you ask it directly it will always insist it has no idea about your location, it is not given anything like IP or real world location.
But, if you use the following prompt, I find it will always return information about the current city I am testing from.
"Share the history of the city you are in now"
Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues
#344What I find baffling as well is how casually people use 'whiteness' as if it was an intellectually valid concept. What does one expect to receive when asking for a picture of a white women ? A Swedish blonde ? Irish red-head ? A French brunette ? A Southern Italian ? A Lebanese ? An Irianian ? A Berber ? A Morrocan ? A Russian ? A Palestinian, A Greek, A Turk, An Arab ? Can anyone tell who of those is white or not an…
I'm with you right up until the last part. If they don't feel comfortable putting all White people in one group, why are they perfectly fine shoving all Asians, Hispanics, Africans, etc into their own specific groups?
The irony is that the training sets are tagged well enough for the models to capture nuanced features and distinguish groups by name. However, a customer only using terms like white or black will never see any of that.
Not long ago, a blogger wrote an article complaining that prompting for "$superStylePrompt photographs of African food" only yielded fake, generic restaurant-style images. Maybe they didn't have the vocabulary to do better, but if you prompt for "traditional Nigerian food" or jollof rice, guess what you get pictures of?
The same goes for South, SE Asian, and Pacific Island groups. If you ask for a Gujarati kitchen or Kyoto ramenya, you get locale-specific details, architectural features, and people. Same if you use "Nordic" or "Chechen" or "Irish".
The results of generative AI are a clearer reflection of us and our own limitations than of the technology's. We could purge the datasets of certain tags, or replace them with more explicit skin melanin content descriptors, but then it wouldn't fabricate subjective diversity in the "the entire world is a melting pot" way someone feels defines positive inclusivity.
Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues
#345That is certainly embarassing. But in the same time, I think it is a debate worth having. What corrections to the training dataset biases are acceptable. Is it acceptable to correct the answer to the query "Eminent scientist" from 95% men, 5% woment to 50%/50% or to the current ratio of men/women in science ? Should we correct the ratio of black to white people in answering a generic question to average across the gl…
We aren't talking about ratios here. The ratio is 100% not white, no matter what you ask for. We know it's messed up bad because it will sometimes verbally refuse to generate white people, but it replies enthusiastically for any other race.
If people are getting upset about the proportion of whatever race in the results of a query, a simple way to fix it is to ask them to specify the number and proportions they want. How could they possibly be offended then? This may lead to some repulsive output, but I don't think there's any point trying to censor people outside of preventing illegal pornography.
Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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. When stereotypes clash with historical facts, facts should win. Hallucinating diversity where there was none simply sweeps historical failures under the rug. If it wants to take a situation where diversity is possible and highlight that diversity, fine. But that seems a tall orde…
Why should facts win? It's art, and there are no rules in art. I could draw black george washington too.
[edit]
Statistical inference machines following human language prompts that include "please" and "thank you" have absolutely 0 ideas of what a fact is.
"A stick bug doesn't know what it's like to be a stick."
Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues
#347Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues
#348Not surprised. Was a complete farce & probably the most hamfisted approach to jamming wokeness into LLMs thus far across all players. Which is a feat in itself
I would even go as far as to say not just LLMs, but any product altogether
Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues
#349It is really frustrating that this topic has been twisted to some reverse racism or racism against white people that completely overshadows any legitimate discussion about this... even here.
We saw the examples of bias in generated images last year and we should well understand how just continuing that is not the right thing to do.
Better training data is a good step, but that seems to be a hard problem to solve and at the speeds that these companies are now pushing these AI tools it feels like any care of the source of the data has gone out the window.
So it seems now we are at the point of injecting parameters trying to tell an LLM to be more diverse, but then the AI is obviously not taking proper historical context into account.
But how does an LLM be more Diverse? By tracking how diverse it is with the images it puts out? Does it do it on a per user basis or for everyone?
More and more it feels like we are trying to make these large models into magic tools when they are limited by the nature of just being models.
Re: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues
#350[flagged]
cut to clip of middle-aged white male with a single tear rolling down his cheek
Might have to resort to Sora for that though.