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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

#691

Post by verisimi »

mort96 wrote: post #674
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

I believe this to be a symptom of a much, much deeper problem than "DEI gone too far". I'm sure that without whatever systems is preventing Gemini from producing pictures of white people, it would be extremely biased towards generating pictures of white people, presumably due to an incredibly biased training data set. I don't remember which one, but there was some image generation AI which was caught pretty much just…

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

#692

Post by aliasxneo »

verisimi wrote: post #687
aliasxneo wrote: post #544

Quite the cultural flame war in this thread. For me, the whole incident points to the critical importance of open models. A bit of speculation, but if AI is eventually intended to play a role in education, this sort of control would be a dream for historical revisionists. The classic battle of the thought police is now being extended to AI.

No need to distance yourself from historical revisionism. History has always been a tool of the present powers to control the future direction. It is just licensed interpretation. No one has the truth, neither the historical revisionists not the licensed historians.

That's not a fair representation of people who have spent their lives preserving historical truth. I'm good friends with an individual in Serbia whose family has been at the forefront of preserving their people's history despite the opposition groups bent on destroying it (the family subsequently received honors for their work). Inferring they are no better than revisionists seems silly.

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

#693

Post by gnicholas »

wepple wrote: post #291
rohtashotas wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a silly mistake. It was rlhf'd to do this intentionally. When the results are more extremist than the unfiltered model, it's no longer a 'small mistake'

rlhf: Reinforcement learning from human feedback

How is this pronounced out loud?

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

#694

Post by duxup »

logicalmonster wrote: post #596

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.

It's very strange that this would leak into a product limitation to me.

I played with Gemini for maybe 10 minutes and I could tell there was clearly some very strange ideas about DEI forced into the tool. It seemed there was a clear "hard coded" ratio of various racial / background required as far as the output it showed me. Or maybe more accurately it had to include specific backgrounds based on how people looked, and maybe some or none of other backgrounds.

What was curious too was the high percentage of people whose look was specific to a specific background. Not any kind of "in-between", just people with one very specific background. Almost felt weirdly stereotypical.

"OH well" I thought. "Not a big deal."

Then I asked Gemini to stop doing that / tried specifying racial backgrounds... Gemini refused.

Tool was pretty much dead to me at that point. It's hard enough to iterate with AI let alone have a high % of it influenced by some prompts that push the results one way or another that I can't control.

How is it that this was somehow approved? Are the people imposing this thinking about the user in any way? How is it someone who is so out of touch with the end user in position to make these decisions?

Makes me not want to use Gemini for anything at this point.

Who knows what other hard coded prompts are there... are my results weighted to use information from a variety of authors with the appropriate backgrounds? I duno ...

If I ask a question about git will they avoid answers that mention the "master" branch?

Any of these seem plausible given the arbitrary nature of the image generation influence.

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

#695

Post by robblbobbl »

logicalmonster wrote: post #596

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.

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

#696

Post by latency-guy2 »

blueflow wrote: post #71
tiznow wrote: post #56

The outcry on this issue has caused me to believe American society is too far divided. Full disclosure, I'm not white. But across a few social media/discussion platforms I more or less saw the same people who cry out about AI daily turn this issue into a tee to sledge "fragile white people" and "techbros". Meanwhile, the aforementioned groups correctly pointed out that Gemini's image generation takes its cues from an…

> Full disclosure, I'm not white Thinking that your skin color somehow influences the validity of your argument is big part of the problem.

To be fair, I wouldn't put a whole lot of blame on them

The position is either self serving as you say, or perception based where other people determine the value of your argument based on your implied race.

The people on HN probably have a good percentage that align well with the latter and think that way, e.g. your opinion matters more if you're X race or minority. That's just who these people are, highly politically motivated people and just are PC day in day out.

It's one strategy out of many to reach these people from their world rather than everyone else's.

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

#697

Post by oceanplexian »

program_whiz wrote: post #446
Jensson wrote: post #139

> Of course the politically sensitive people are waging war over it. Just like politically sensitive people waged war over Google identifying an obscured person as a Gorilla. Its just a silly mistake, how could anyone get upset over that?

The real reason is because it shows the heavy "diversity" bias Google has, and this has real implications for a lot of situations because Google is big and for most people a dream job. Understanding that your likelihood of being hired into the most prestigious tech companies is probably hindered if you don't look "diverse" or "female" angers people. This is just one sign/smell of it, and so it causes outrage. Evidenc…

You touched on it briefly but a big problem is that it undermines truly talented people who belong to underrepresented groups. Those individuals DO exist, I interview them all the time and they deserve to know they got the offer because they were excellent and passed the bar, not because of a diversity quota.

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

#698

Post by [deleted] »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #217
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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

" 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

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

#699

Post by optimalsolver »

trallnag wrote: post #541
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.

Nah, it's not just the US. Ever heard of the BBC? They are from Britain.

I thought BBC was more of an American obsession?
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