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Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

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

#531
post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as someone far to the left of a US style "liberal", that is equally offensive and racist as only generating white people. Injecting fake diversity into situations where it is historically inaccurate is just as big a problem as erasing diversity where it exists. The Nazi example is stark, and perhaps too stark, in that spreading fake notions of what they look like seems ridiculous now, but there are more borderlin…

I think you hit on an another important issue: Do people want the generated images to be representative, or aspirational?

I think there's a large overlap there, in that in media, to ensure an experience of representation you often need to exaggerate minority presence (and not just in terms of ethnicity or gender) to create a reasonable impression, because if you "round down" you'll often end up with a homogeneous mass that creates impressions of bias in the other direction. In that sense, it will often end up aspirational.

E.g. let's say you're making something about a population with 5% black people, and you're presenting a group of 8. You could justify making that group entirely white very easily - you've just rounded down, and plenty of groups of 8 within a population like that will be all white (and some will be all black). But you're presenting a narrow slice of an experience of that society, and not including a single black person without reason makes it easy to create an impression of that population as entirely white.

But it also needs to at scale be representative within plausible limits, or it just gets insultingly dumb or even outright racist, just against a different set of people.

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

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> supplanted by hyper-racist activism in academia Can you give an example of "hyper-racist activism?"

Sure: Kendi, Ibram X.

> Kendi, Ibram X.

What specifically is "hyper-racist" about him? I read his wikipedia entry and didn't find anything "hyper-racist" about him.

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

#533

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…

> 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 Why is this a "problem"? If you want an image of a nurse of a different ethnicity, ask for it.

right? UX problem masqueraded as something else

always funniest when software professionals fall for that

I think google’s model is funny, and over compensating, but the generic prompts are lazy

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

#534

How much of this do they do to their search results?

>How much of this do they do to their search results?

This is what I'm wondering too.

I am aware that there have been kerfuffles in the past about Googe Image Searching for `white people` pulling up non-white pictures, but thought that that was because so much of the source material doesn't specify `white` for white people because it's assumed to be the default. I assumed that that was happening again when first hearing of the strange Gemini results, until seeing the evidence of explicit prompt injection and clearly ahistorical/nonsensical results.

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

#535
post #471
post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 agree there aren't any perfect solutions, but a reasonable solution is to go 1) if the user specifies, generally accept that (none of these providers will be willing to do so without some safeguards, but for the most part there are few compelling reasons not to), 2) if the user doesn't specify , priority one ought to be that it is consistent with history and setting, and only then do you aim for plausible diversity…

> Maybe they should also include explanations of assumptions in the output.

I think you're giving these systems a lot more "reasoning" credit than they deserve. As far as I know they don't make assumptions they just apply a weighted series of probabilities and make output. They also can't explain why they chose the weights because they didn't, they were programmed with them.

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

#536

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…

> supplanted by hyper-racist activism in academia Can you give an example of "hyper-racist activism?"

"You can't be racist against white people"

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

#538
post #125
post #87

Honestly, I'm baffled by the American keywordism and obsession with images. They seem to think that if they don't say certain words and show people from minorities in the marketing material the racism and discrimination will be solved and atrocities from the past will be forgiven. It only become unmanageable and builds up resentment. Anyway, maybe its a phase. Sometimes I wonder if the openly racist European&Asians w…

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

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is a "lack of diversity" a problem? Do different races have different attributes which complement each other on a team?

By that argument, developing countries aren't very diverse at all, which is why they aren't doing as well.
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