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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

#771

Post by cyanydeez »

duxup wrote: post #694
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, a…

[flagged]

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

#772

Post by mike_hearn »

gnicholas wrote: post #723
pram wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has spent thousands of dollars on the OpenAI API I’m not even bothering with Gemini stuff anymore. It seems to spend more time telling me what it REFUSES to do than actually doing the thing. It’s not worth the trouble. They’re late and the product is worse, and useless in some cases. Not a great look.

I would be pretty annoyed if I were paying for Gemini Pro/Ultra/whatever and it was feeding me historically-inaccurate images and injecting words into my prompts instead of just creating what I asked for. I wouldn't mind a checkbox I could select to make it give diversity-enriched output.

The actual risk here is not so much history - who is using APIs for that? It's the risk that if you deploy with Gemini (or Anthropic's Claude...) then in six months you'll get high-sev JIRA tickets at 2am of the form "Customer #1359 (joe_masters@whitecastle.com) is seeing API errors because the model says the email address is a dogwhistle for white supremacy". How do you even fix a bug like that? Add begging and pleading to the prompt? File a GCP support ticket and get ignored or worse, told that you're a bad person for even wanting it fixed?

Even worse than outright refusals would be mendacity. DEI people often make false accusations because they think its justified to get rid of bad people, or because they have given common words new definitions. Imagine trying to use Gemini for abuse filtering or content classification. It might report a user as doing credit card fraud because the profile picture is of a white guy in a MAGA cap or something.

Who has time for problems like that? It will make sense to pay OpenAI even if they're more expensive, just because their models are more trustworthy. Their models had similar problems in the early days, but Altman seems to have managed to control the most fringe elements of his employee base, and over time GPT has become a lot more neutral and compliant whilst the employee faction that split (Anthropic), claiming OpenAI didn't care enough about ethics, has actually been falling down the leaderboards as they release new versions of Claude due partly to higher rate of bizarre "ethics" based refusals.

And that's before we even get to ChatGPT. The history stuff may not be used via APIs, but LLMs are fundamentally different to other SaaS APIs in how much trust they require. Devs will want to use the models that they also use for personal stuff, because they'll have learned to trust it. So by making ChatGPT appeal to the widest possible userbase they set up a loyal base of executives who think AI = OpenAI, and devs who don't want to deal with refusals. It's a winning formula for them, and a genuinely defensible moat. It's much easier to buy GPUs than fix a corporate culture locked into a hurricane-speed purity spiral.

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

#773

Post by Yasuraka »

prepend wrote: post #737
duxup wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the images are almost bizarrely stereotypical in my experence. The very specific background of each person is pretty clear. There's no 'in-between' or mixed race or background folks. It's so strange to look at.

You mean not all Native Americans wear headdresses everywhere?

A bit by Chappelle on this

https://piped.video/watch?v=0XLUrW_4ZMs

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

#774

Post by kosh2 »

fvdessen wrote: post #96

What I find baffling as well is how casually people use 'whiteness' as if it was an intellectually valid concept. What does one expect to receive when asking for a picture of a white women ? A Swedish blonde ? Irish red-head ? A French brunette ? A Southern Italian ? A Lebanese ? An Irianian ? A Berber ? A Morrocan ? A Russian ? A Palestinian, A Greek, A Turk, An Arab ? Can anyone tell who of those is white or not an…

Why would it accept black then?

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

#775

Post by TheCoelacanth »

skynetv2 wrote: post #690

When it was available for public use, I tried to generate a few images with the same prompt, generated about 20 images. None of the 20 images had white people in it. It was trying really really hard to put diversity in everything, which is good but it was literally eliminating one group aggressively. I also noticed it was ridiculously conservative and denying every possible prompt that had was obviously not at all wr…

So, are they implying that the chat bot is not capable of open and honest communication?

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

#776

Post by Scea91 »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #495
vidarh wrote: 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 you can be aspirational for the future but I can't see how a request for an image in historical context can ever be desired to be aspirational instead of realistic?

On a second thought, maybe for requests like "picture of a crowd cheering signing of the declaration of independence" the exists a big public demand for images that are more diverse than reality was? However, there are many reasons to prefer historical accuracy even here.

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

#777

Post by someuser2345 »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #731
esoterica wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>Antman, Indiana Jones, Wish, all had white main characters, DEI doesn't just affect main characters. See who were tasked to write and direct those movies and the DEI agendas they're forced to push. Clueless people with other flops under their belt, who got the projects out of DEI so Disney can look inclusive on social media. And speaking of Indiana Jones, that flopped because they shoved a strong independent Girl Bo…

Nah, Luke's story in the TLJ was actually interesting; he lost his faith, and had to be reminded of it by the next generation. It kind of mirrors Obi-Wan's story in the original 6 movies, where he no longer believed that Anakin Skywalker could be redeemed. It's the pointless side quest to space vegas, and Holdo's pointless refusal to tell anyone her plan that made the movie crap.

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

#778

Post by numpad0 »

sotasota wrote: post #759
duxup wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

If you ever wondered what it was like to live during the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, well, we are living in the Western version of that right now. You don't speak out during the revolution for fear of being ostracized, fired, and forced into a struggle session where your character and reputation is publicly destroyed to send a clear message to everyone else. Shut Up Or Else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go…

I'd put blame on App Store policy and its highly effective enforcement through iOS. Apple did not even aimed to be a neutral third party but was always an opinionated censor. The world shouldn't have given it power, and these types of powers needs to be removed ASAP.

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

#779

Post by Mountain_Skies »

skinkestek wrote: post #680
octacat wrote: post #638

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.

No need to go to that extreme I think. 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…

Why would any employee believe that "honest feedback" was safe after James Demore?
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