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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

#871

Post by eadmund »

lwansbrough wrote: post #3

Issue appears to be that the uncensored model too closely reflects reality with all its troubling details such as history.

History? George Washington was always Black, Genghis Khan was always white, and Julius Caesar was always an albino Japanese woman. Also, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, war is peace and freedom is slavery.

From my more substantive comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471003:

> The Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984 would have loved this sort of thing. Why go to the work of manually rewriting history when you can just generate a new one on demand? … Generative AI should strive to be actually unbiased. That means it should not skew numbers in either direction, for anyone.

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

#872

Post by randounho »

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.

[flagged]

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

#873

Post by eadmund »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #185
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a hefty percentage of the people responsible for the current day's obsession with identity issues openly state racism against white people is impossible. This has been part of their belief system for decades, probably heard on a widescale for the first time during an episode of season one of 'The Real World' in 1992 but favored in academia for much longer than that.

It's because they have a very different definition of racism. Basically, according to this belief, if you are seen as part of the ethnic group in power, you will not be able to experience noteworthy levels of discrimination because of your genetic makeup.

> if you are seen as part of the ethnic group in power, you will not be able to experience noteworthy levels of discrimination

That is not a crazy idea, but it does raise the question: who is the ethnic group currently in power? Against which group will slurs and discrimination result in punishment, and against which group will they be ignored — or even praised?

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

#874

Post by BurningFrog »

s3p wrote: post #867
BurningFrog wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly not in my Silicon Valley teams. I'd say maybe 40% white (half of which are immigrants) and 80% male. More diverse than any leftist activist group I've seen.

Interesting tidbit, but was the political snark at the end really necessary?

Not much is necessary, but it felt on topic because it's arguing against leftist fantasies that SW engineers are all straight white males.

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

#875

Post by wepple »

gnicholas wrote: post #693
wepple wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rlhf: Reinforcement learning from human feedback

How is this pronounced out loud?

I was just saving folks a google, as I had no idea what the acronym was.

I propose rill-hiff until someone who actually know what they’re doing shows up!

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

#876

Post by jstarfish »

DonHopkins wrote: post #101
Simulacra wrote: post #70

This is almost a tacit admission that they did put their finger on the scale. Is it really AI if there is human intervention?

[flagged]

> In case you weren't aware (or "woke") enough to know the truth, there are already some extremely heavy fingers on the other side of the scale when it comes to training AI. So why shouldn't they have their finger on the scale to make it more balanced?

Because this is a lie. It's not balanced, it's a full tilt in the opposite direction. The bullied become the bullies. Most people are centrists who do want actual equality. This shit isn't equality, it's open racism against white people being shoved down everyone's throats. Calling it balanced is just the euphemism you give it to obfuscate your own racist intentions.

We're not racist or sexist, we're just not the fucking morons you make us out to be.

> If you refuse to intervene when you see bigotry and sexism and racism, then you're a bigoted sexist racist, part of the problem.

The problem is that we're being trained to see x-isms everywhere. Accountability is being conflated with persecution.

We're told the police policing in black neighborhoods is racist. When the police withdraw and abandon them to their fate, that's also racist.

There's really no winning with the left; they're militant Narcissists.

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

#877

Post by curtisblaine »

Can't help but imagine how the minority engineers of Google might feel going to work to fix a prompt asking AI to forcefully and itrealistically over-represent their racial fratures, all while the whole Internet is cranking out memes with black Voltaires and Vikings. How this helps DEI eludes me.

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

#878

Post by arrakeen »

u32480932048 wrote: post #845
Workaccount2 wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second part is literally how we got the term Latinx. A bunch of white elites congratulating themselves for "removing sexism" from a language that they have a pamphlet level understanding of.

This is perhaps the single best example of it. I guess paternalistic colonialism is only a problem when other people do it.

i know real mexican people in cdmx that use latinx. but i guess they must've been brainwashed by the white wokes

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

#879

Post by EvgeniyZh »

empath-nirvana wrote: post #387
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…

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…

What is exactly the problem that you think needs a solution? The fact that the distributions of generated samples do not match real-life distributions [1]? How important this issue actually is? Are there any measurements? The reasoning probably goes "underrepresented in generations -> underrepresented in consumed media -> underrepresented in real life" but is there any evidence to each of the implications? Is there any real life impact worth all the money and time they spent, or just donating it for a few kids to go through a law school would actually be better?

Being unable to generate white people from direct request is not solution to this problem, just like being unable to generate joke about Muslims. It's just pumping ideology in the product because they can. Racial stereotypes are bad (well you know, against groups that stereotypically struggle in US) unless of course there is a positive trait to compensate for it [2]. It's not about matching to real distributions, it's about matching to dreamed picture of the world.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-generative-ai-bias/

[2] https://twitter.com/CornChowder76/status/1760147627134403064

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

#880

Post by iteratethis »

djtriptych wrote: post #561
multicast wrote: post #501

We live in times were non-problems are turned into problems. Simple responses should be generated truthfully. Truth which is present in today's data. Most software engineers and CEOs are white and male, almost all US rappers are black and male, most childminder and nurses are female from all kinds of races. If you want the person to be of another race or sex, add it to the prompt. If you want a software engineer from…

is it even true that most software engineers are white and male? We're discarding indian and chinese engineers?

Those are "white-adjacent". They're the glitch in the woke matrix.

They're minorities, non-white, yet they perform. Outperform even. This suggests that merit works no matter your background which breaks identity politics.

Hence, successful minorities project "whiteness". This includes awful behavior like punctuality and rationalism.

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