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

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

#411

Post by KittenInABox » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:22 PM UTC

tyleo wrote: post #234

_heimdall wrote: post #224

We humans haven't even figured out how to discuss race, sex, or gender without it devolving into a tribal political fight. We shouldn't be surprised that algorithms we create and train on our own content will similarly be confused. Its the exact same reason we won't solve the alignment problem and have basically given up on it. We can't align humans with ourselves, we'll absolutely never define some magic ruleset tha…

Idk that those discussions human problems TBH or at least I don’t think they are distributed equally. America has a special obsession with these discussions and is a loud voice in the room.

America is divided on race, sure, but other divisions exist in other countries just as strongly. South Korea is in a little bit of a gender war at the moment, and I'm not talking trans people, I mean literally demanding the removal of women from public life who are outed as "feminist".

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

#412

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:22 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…

[deleted]

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

#413

Post by jack_riminton » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:22 PM UTC

solarhexes wrote: post #388

jack_riminton wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of when black people in the UK get called African American by Americans. No they're neither African nor American It's an incredibly self-centered view of the world

I think it’s just that’s the word you’ve been taught to use. It’s divorced from the meaning of its constituent parts, you aren’t saying “an American of African descent” you’re saying “black” but in what was supposed to be some kind of politically correct way. I cannot imagine even the most daft American using it in the UK and intending that the person is actually American.

Well it's pretty daft to call anyone American if they're not American

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

#414

Post by btbuildem » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:23 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

No, it's not reasonable. It goes against actual history, facts, and collected statistics. It's so ham-fisted and over the top, it reveals something about how ineptly and irresponsibly these decisions were made internally.

An unfair use of a stereotype would be placing someone of a certain ethnicity in a demeaning context (eg, if you asked for a picture of an Irish person and it rendered a drunken fool).

The Google wokeness committee bolted on something absurdly crude, seems like "when showing people, always include a black, an asian and an native american person" which rightfully results in a pushback from people who have brains.

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

#415

Post by renegade-otter » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:23 PM UTC

empath-nirvana wrote: post #387

34679 wrote: post #277

Here's the problem for Google: Gemini pukes out a perfect visual representation of actual systemic racism that pervades throughout modern corporate culture in the US. Daily interactions can be masked by platitudes and dog whistles. A poster of non-white celtic warriors cannot. Gemini refused to create an image of "a nice white man", saying it was "too spicy", but had no problem when asked for an image of "a nice blac…

There is an _actual problem_ that needs to be solved. If you ask generative AI for a picture of a "nurse", it will produce a picture of a white woman 100% of the time, without some additional prompting or fine tuning that encourages it to do something else. If you ask a generative AI for a picture of a "software engineer", it will produce a picture of a white guy 100% of the time, without some additional prompting or…

It's the Social Media Problem (e.g. Twitter) - at global scale, someone will ALWAYS be unhappy with the results.

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

#416

Post by hersko » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:24 PM UTC

jorvi wrote: post #334

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" when i was there it was so sad to me that none of the senior leadership in deepmind dared to question this ideology [...] i watched my colleagues at nvidia (like @tunguz), openai (roon), etc. who were literally doing stuff that would get you kicked out of google on a daily basis and couldn't believe how different google is " Aleksa Gordić, https://x.com/gordic_aleksa/status/1760266452475494828

Interestingly enough the same terror of political correctness seems to take center stage at Mozilla. But then it seems much less so at places like Microsoft or Apple. I wonder if there’s a correlation with being a tech company that was founded in direct relation to the internet vs. being founded in relation to personal / enterprise computing, and how that sort of seeds the initial culture.

Is Microsoft really better? Remember this[1] bizarre intro during Microsoft Ignite?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBRtucXGeNQ

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

#417

Post by Aurornis » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:24 PM UTC

empath-nirvana wrote: post #387

34679 wrote: post #277

Here's the problem for Google: Gemini pukes out a perfect visual representation of actual systemic racism that pervades throughout modern corporate culture in the US. Daily interactions can be masked by platitudes and dog whistles. A poster of non-white celtic warriors cannot. Gemini refused to create an image of "a nice white man", saying it was "too spicy", but had no problem when asked for an image of "a nice blac…

There is an _actual problem_ that needs to be solved. If you ask generative AI for a picture of a "nurse", it will produce a picture of a white woman 100% of the time, without some additional prompting or fine tuning that encourages it to do something else. If you ask a generative AI for a picture of a "software engineer", it will produce a picture of a white guy 100% of the time, without some additional prompting or…

> If you ask generative AI for a picture of a "nurse", it will produce a picture of a white woman 100% of the time, without some additional prompting or fine tuning that encourages it to do something else.

> If you ask a generative AI for a picture of a "software engineer", it will produce a picture of a white guy 100% of the time, without some additional prompting or fine tuning that encourages it to do something else.

Neither of these statements is true, and you can verify it by prompting any of the major generative AI platforms more than a couple times.

I think your comment is representative of the root problem: The imagined severity of the problem has been exaggerated to such extremes that companies are blindly going to the opposite extreme in order to cancel out what they imagine to be the problem. The result is the kind of absurdity we’re seeing in these generated images.

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

#418

Post by rosmax_1337 » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:24 PM UTC

Why does google dislike white people? What does this have to do with corporate greed? (which you could always assume when a company does something bad)

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

#419

Post by mlrtime » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:24 PM UTC

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #192

mrtksn wrote: post #4

For context: There was an outcry in social media after Gemini refused to generate images of white people, leading deeply inaccurate in historic sense images being generated. Though the issue might be more nuanced than the mainstream narrative, it had some hilarious examples. Of course the politically sensitive people are waging war over it. Here are some popular examples: https://dropover.cloud/7fd7ba

" a friend at google said he knew gemini was this bad...but couldn't say anything until today (he DMs me every few days). lots of ppl in google knew. but no one really forced the issue obv and said what needed to be said google is broken " Razib Khan, https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/1760545472681267521

TBH if I were at Google and they asked all employees to dogfood this product and give feedback, I would not say anything about this. With recent firings why risk your neck?

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

#420

Post by jelling » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:25 PM UTC

34679 wrote: post #277

Here's the problem for Google: Gemini pukes out a perfect visual representation of actual systemic racism that pervades throughout modern corporate culture in the US. Daily interactions can be masked by platitudes and dog whistles. A poster of non-white celtic warriors cannot. Gemini refused to create an image of "a nice white man", saying it was "too spicy", but had no problem when asked for an image of "a nice blac…

I had the same problem while designing an AI related tool and the solution is simple: ask the user a clarifying question as to whether they want a specific ethnic background or default to random.

No matter what technical solution they come up with, even if there were one, it will be a PR disaster. But if they just make the user choose the problem is solved.