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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

#591

Post by Shorel »

itsoktocry wrote: post #469
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…

> 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.

Because then it refuses to comply?

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

#592

Post by didntcheck »

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.

How so? Organizations have been very open and explicit about wanting to employ less white people and seeing "whiteness" as a societal ill that needs addressing. I really don't understand this trend of people excitedly advocating for something then crying foul when you say that they said it

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

#593

Post by michaelrpeskin »

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'm not saying the current situation is good or optimal. But it's not obvious what the right result should be.

Yes, it's not obvious what the first result returned should be. Maybe a safe bet is to use the current ratio of sexes/races as the probability distribution just to counter bias in the training data. I don't think all but the most radical among us would get too mad about that.

What probability distribution? It can't be that hard to use the country/region of where the query is being made? Or the country/region about which the image is being asked for? All reasonable choices.

But, if the image generated isn't what you need (say the image of senators from the 1800's example). You should be able to direct it to what you need.

So just to be PC, it generates images of all kind of diverse people. Fine, but then you say, update it to be older white men. Then it should be able to do that. It's not racist to ask for that.

I would like for it to know the right answer right away, but I can imagine the political backlash for doing that, so I can see why they'd default to "diversity". But the refusal to correct images is what's over-the-top.

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

#594

Post by hnburnsy »

Google in 2013...

https://web.archive.org/web/20130924061952/www.google.com/ex...

>The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results. Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the comprehensiveness of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it.

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

#595

Post by commandlinefan »

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…

Everybody seems to be focusing on the actual outcome while ignoring the more disconcerting meta-problem: how in the world _could_ an AI have been trained that would produce a black Albert Einstein? What was it even trained _on_? This couldn't have been an accident, the developers had to have bent over backwards to make this happen, in a really strange way.

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

#596

Post by logicalmonster »

Personally speaking, this is a blaring neon warning sign of institutional rot within Google where shrieking concerns about DEI have surpassed a focus on quality results.

Investors in Google (of which I am NOT one) should consider if this is the mark of a company on the upswing or downslide. If the focus of Google's technology is identity rather than reality, it is inevitable that they will be surpassed.

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

#597

Post by commandlinefan »

hnburnsy wrote: post #594

Google in 2013... https://web.archive.org/web/20130924061952/www.google.com/ex... >The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results. Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such r…

~~don't~~ be evil.

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

#598

Post by DebtDeflation »

mlrtime wrote: post #401
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…

But why give those two examples? Why didn't you use an example of a "Professional Athlete"? There is no problem with these examples if you assume that the person wants the statistically likely example... this is ML after all, this is exactly how it works. If I ask you to think of a Elephant, what color do you think of? Wouldn't you expect an AI image to be the color you thought of?

It would be an interesting experiment. If you asked it to generate an image of an NBA basketball player, statistically you would expect it to produce an image of a black male. Would it have produced images of white females and asian males instead? That would have provided some sense of whether the alignment was to increase diversity or just minimize depictions of white males. Alas, it's impossible to get it to generate anything that even has a chance of having people in it now. I tried "basketball game", "sporting event", "NBA Finals" and it refused each time. Finally tried "basketball court" and it produced what looked like a 1970s Polaroid of an outdoor hoop. They must've really dug deep to eliminate any possibility of a human being in a generated image.

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

#599

Post by lolinder »

commandlinefan wrote: post #595
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…

Everybody seems to be focusing on the actual outcome while ignoring the more disconcerting meta-problem: how in the world _could_ an AI have been trained that would produce a black Albert Einstein? What was it even trained _on_? This couldn't have been an accident, the developers had to have bent over backwards to make this happen, in a really strange way.

This isn't very surprising if you've interacted much with these models. Contrary to the claims in the various lawsuits, they're not just regurgitating images they've seen before, they have a good sense of abstract concepts and can pretty easily combine ideas to make things that have never been seen before.

This type of behavior has been evident ever since DALL-E's horse-riding astronaut [0]. There's no training image that resembles it (the astronaut even has their hands in the right position... mostly), it's combining ideas about what a figure riding a horse looks like and what an astronaut looks like.

Changing Albert Einstein's skin color should be even easier.

[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1049061/dalle-op...

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