671–680 of 1001 posts
And I am thankful that the rest of Google is following.
Once I would have been super excited to even get an interview. When I got one I was the one who didn't really want.
I think we've been lucky that they crashed before destroying every other software company.
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Asked to generate any image of people (British kings, American colonists, German WW2 soldiers (!), the founders of Google (!!), Roman centurions, Vikings, historical Popes, you name it) it would invariably generate them as women and/ or non-whites. Asked specifically to generate images of people of various ethnic groups, it would happily do it except in the case of white people, in which it would flatly refuse. The w…
What's weird is that this is produced by the same Google that runs Youtube, which invariably wants to serve me more and more rightwing flavored content. Possibly the recommendation engine gets thrown off by the user base who spends hours and hours a day on Youtube vs the general population?
For a week or two, I was presented with tons of Jordan Peterson talks, which I've never clicked on because of my tendency to consciously ignore .
After clicking on everything except Peterson-adjacent videos, my feed is now filled with "Bill Maher owns the libs!" shorts. I don't get it.
It's hardly "politically sensitive" to be disappointed by this behaviour: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465554 "Asked specifically to generate images of people of various ethnic groups, it would happily do it except in the case of white people, in which it would flatly refuse."
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
I don't remember which one, but there was some image generation AI which was caught pretty much just appending the names of random races to the prompt, to the point that prompts like "picture of a person holding up a sign which says" would show pictures of people holding signs with the words "black" or "white" or "asian" on them. This was also a hacky workaround for the fact that the data set was biased.
It's hardly "politically sensitive" to be disappointed by this behaviour: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465554 "Asked specifically to generate images of people of various ethnic groups, it would happily do it except in the case of white people, in which it would flatly refuse."
It’s being politically sensitive to assert that this was obviously the intent of Google and that it demonstrates that they’re wholly consumed by the woke mind virus, or whatever, as many commenters have done. The sensible alternative explanation is that this issue is an overcorrection made in an attempt to address well-documented biases these models have when not fine tuned.
Like, if I were on that team, it'd be pretty risky to question this, and it'd probably not lead to change. So they let the public do it instead.
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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
> really don't understand this trend of people excitedly advocating for something then crying foul when you say that they said it A friend of mine calls this the Celebration Parallax. "This thing isn't happening, and it's good that it is happening." Depending on who is describing the event in question, the event is either not happening and a dog-whistling conspiracy theory, or it is happening and it's a good thing.
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Allowing a political agenda to drive the programming of the algorithm instead of engineering.
Algorithms and engineering that make non binary decisions inherently have the politics of the creator embedded. Sucks that is life.
Google did giant, fiscally unnecessary layoffs just before AI took off again. They got rid of a giant portion of their most experienced (expensive) employees, signaled more coming to the other talented ones, and took the GE approach to maximizing short term profits over re-investment in the future. Well, it backfired sooner than leadership expected.
There is no other solution than federating AI the same way as Mastodon does etc. It's obviously not right that one company has the power to generate and manipulate things (filtering IS a form of manipulation).
Is mastodon a success? I agree federation is the best strategy (I have a blog and HN and nothing else), but twitter seems to still utterly dominate Add in a really significant requirement for cheap compute, and I don’t know that a federated or distributed model is even slightly possible?
Apparently, Google has an issue with people. Nice tech, but trying to automate everything would hit you. Funny, the fiasco could've been avoided, if they would use QA from /b/ imageboard. Because generating Nazis is the first thing /b/ would try. But yea, Google would rather fire people instead.
Just letting ordinary employees experiment with it and leave honest feedback on it knowing they were safe and not risking the boot could have exposed most of these problems.
But Google couldn't even manage to not fire that bloke who very politely mentioned that women and men think differently. I think a lot of people realized there and then that if they wanted to keep their jobs at Google, they better not say anything that offends the wrong folks.
I was in their hiring pipeline at that point. It certainly changed how I felt about them.