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

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

#451

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:36 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #402

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…

> actual systemic racism that pervades throughout modern corporate culture Ooph. The projection here is just too much. People jumping straight across all the reasonable interpretations straight to the maximal conspiracy theory. Surely this is just a bug. ML has always had trouble with "racism" accusations, but for years it went in the other direction . Remember all the coverage of "I asked for a picture of a criminal…

[deleted]

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

#452

Post by sevagh » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:36 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #308

xanderlewis wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s because almost all of this is a distinctly American obsession and problem. Unfortunately it’s gleefully been exported worldwide into contexts where it doesn’t immediately — if at all — apply over the last five years or so and now we’re all saddled with this slow-growing infection. Entire careers are built on the sort of thing that led Google to this place, and they’re not gonna give up easily.

While I mostly agree with you, I just want to point out that the UK, Canada and Australia have this illness as well. What was an American problem has become an Anglophone problem.

The Anglosphere/commonwealth move as one under the heel of the U.S. There's no point speaking of them as independent entities that "happen to agree"

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

#453

Post by mlrtime » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:38 PM UTC

mountainb wrote: post #376

It's odd that long after 70s-2000s post-modernism has been supplanted by hyper-racist activism in academia, Google finally produced a true technological engine for postmodern expression through the lens of this contemporary ideology. Imagine for a moment a Gemini that just altered the weights on a daily or hourly basis, so one hour you had it producing material from an exhumed Jim Crow ideology, the next hour you'd h…

It's fascinating, and in the past this moment would be captured by a artists interpretation of the absurd. But now we just let AI do it for us.

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

#454

Post by rondini » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:38 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…

Are you seriously claiming that the actual systemic racism in our society is discrimination against white people? I just struggle to imagine someone holding this belief in good faith.

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

#455

Post by mhuffman » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:39 PM UTC

rosmax_1337 wrote: post #418

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)

>Why does google dislike white people?

Because it is currently in fashion to do so.

>What does this have to do with corporate greed?

It has to do with a lot of things, but specifically greed-related the very fastest way to lose money or damage your brand is to offend someone that has access to large social reach. So better for them to err on the side of safety.

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

#456

Post by vdaea » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:39 PM UTC

rondini wrote: post #454

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…

Are you seriously claiming that the actual systemic racism in our society is discrimination against white people? I just struggle to imagine someone holding this belief in good faith.

He didn't say "our society", he said "modern corporate culture in the US"

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

#457

Post by hersko » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:40 PM UTC

ragnaruss wrote: post #343

Gemini 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"

Lol this works. That's wild.

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

#458

Post by psychoslave » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:41 PM UTC

D13Fd wrote: post #398

empath-nirvana wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 el…

I guess pleasing everyone with a small sample of result images all integrating the same biases would be next to impossible.

On the other hand, it’s probably trivial at this point to generate a sample that endorses different well known biases as a default result, isn’t it? And stating it explicitly in the interface is probably not requiring that much complexity, doesn’t it?

I think the major benefit of current AI technologies is to showcase how horribly biased the source works are.

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

#459

Post by datadrivenangel » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:41 PM UTC

rosmax_1337 wrote: post #418

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)

Google dislikes getting bad PR.

Modern western tech society will criticize (mostly correctly) a lack of diversity in basically any aspect of a company or technology. This often is expressed in shorthand as there being too many white cis men.

Don't forget google's fancy doors didn't work as well for black people at once point. Lots of bad PR.

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

#460

Post by vidarh » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 2:41 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #324

mattzito wrote: post #289

Earlier 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. 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 exi…

The stereotype of a human in general would not be white in any case.

And the stereotype the person asking would expect will heavily depend on where they're from.

Before you ask for stereotypes: Whose stereotypes? Across which population? And why does those stereotypes make sense?

I think Google fucked up thoroughly here, but they did so trying to correct for biases also gets things really wrong for a large part of the world.