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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

#961

Post by kderbyma »

subsubzero wrote: post #836
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.

I have been saying this for years but google is probably the most dysfunctional and slowest moving company in tech that is only surviving by its blatant search monopoly. Given that OpenAI a tiny company by comparison is destroying them on AI shows just how bad they are run. I see them falling slowly in the next year or as search is supplanted by AI and then expect to see a huge drop as they see huge usage drops. Yout…

Pinchai is anything but a good leader....he is the blandest CEO yet somehow is seeped in politics....

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

#962

Post by kosh2 »

This is not something that is only a thing within google. Similar things are happening in a lot of companies and even public institutions like schools, universities and public media networks like the BBC.

It's Doctor who traveling to medieval Britain and showing a level of diversity that we see today. Or black Cleopatra. Or black Vikings. The list goes on and on.

In this case, they were overdoing it and so they will turn it down but I doubt they will "turn it off". Of course, the people who are doing it, will never acknowledge it and gaslight anybody who points it out as weird right wing conspiracy nut, but in cases like this, you can see it happening in a very obvious way.

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

#963

Post by woobar »

Satisfy4400 wrote: post #864
TheKarateKid wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been known for a few years now that Google Image Search has been just as inaccurately biased with clear hard-coded intervention (unless it's using a similarly flawed AI model?) to the point where it is flat out censorship. For example, go search for "white American family" right now. Out of 25 images, only 3 properly match my search. The rest are either photos of diverse families, or families entirely with POC…

Just tried the same search and here are my results for the first 25 images: 6 "all" white race families and 5 with at least one white person. Of the remaining 14 images, 13 feature a non-white family in front of a white background. The other image features a non-white family with children in bright white dresses. Can't say I'm feeling too worked up over those results.

How many images with black background or black clothes are there if you use word "black" in the same query?

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

#964

Post by kurige »

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 feel like the fact that you are able to say this, and the sentiment echoed in other comments, is a pretty decent sign that the "movement" has peaked. It was just a few years ago that anybody voicing this kind of opinion was immediately shot down and buried on this very forum.

It will take a while for DEI to cool down in corporate settings, as that will always be lagging behind social sentiment in broader society.

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

#965

Post by elzbardico »

aembleton wrote: post #328
elzbardico wrote: post #235

Those kind of hilarious examples of political non-sense seem to be a distinctive feature of anglo societies. I can't see a French, Swedish or Italian company being so infantile and superficial. Please America. Grow the fuck up!

Use an AI from France, Sweden or Italy then.

It seems more likely that in ten years we all be using a Chinese one. They are already the bigger economy.

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

#966

Post by pram »

eadmund wrote: post #871
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 rewriti…

FWIW the government in 1984 actually had automated content generation, since thats how they produced pornography for the proles.

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

#967

Post by scada_slayer »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #926
Intralexical wrote: post #851

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However you choose to be upset about this, you always have someone crazy to point at. Scary! I hope nobody finds a way to exploit this dynamic for profit.

Why do you think the elites love this woke shit? Because it divides people.

More than just the elites. The extreme division between all Americans from any group - political, racial, religious etc. - is all part of a large, ongoing cyberwarfare attack from Russia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

I'm sure other nations are involved, Russia has just done the most recorded damage so far. The entire point of red vs blue, black vs white, rich vs poor rhetoric is to divide and conquer the American people.

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

#968

Post by epivosism »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #904
epivosism wrote: post #883

Dall-E 3 at least exposes the adjusted prompt. Here's an example of it; you can get it if you hit the API directly and look at revised_prompt. https://twitter.com/eb_french/status/1760763534127010074 At least they show it to us; and you can prepare or attempt to convince the GPT which interprets your prompt into not doing it quite as much (although the example above is where I failed; it seems like it's on to me, bec…

Yup, I run an IRC bot with a !dall-e trigger (with protections so people don't run up my OpenAI bill!), and when I get the response back, my bot gives the revised prompt in addition to the image result URL. Lots of added diversity in the prompts. Note that I call it added diversity, not forced diversity, because if I ask for a specific race, it will give it to me, and does not override or refuse the requests like Gem…

Yeah, expanding and making prompts specific via LLMs is a good idea. I would like to be able to see and fight better against the outer prompt in some situations, though. Dalle-3 can be really persistent in certain cases.

The whole alleged theoretical reason for this doesn't work. There is no proposed way to even implement a globally fair representation plan. So it just feels hacky that very USA-21st century-specific grievance groups show up in all global images from the USA to India to Rome to the Mongolian steppe.

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

#969

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

janalsncm wrote: post #844
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

Here’s a simpler explanation. Google is getting their butt kicked by OpenAI and rushed out an imperfect product. This is one of probably 50 known issues with Gemini but it got enough attention that they had to step in and disable a part of the product.

That's a simpler explanation but one that I think misses the point completely. A huge reason "Google is getting their butt kicked by OpenAI" in the first place is because they had lots of people internally who acted as nothing but "vetoers", demanding the pace of AI slow down less it accidentally show too many white people. And this outcome is wholly unsurprising given that Google's second most important AI principle is "Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias.": https://ai.google/responsibility/principles/

In other words, you talk about "50 known issues with Gemini", but this issue was not a result of technical underperformance, on the contrary, is was the result of Google making things more difficult for themselves in an effort to satisfy a (false) idealized view of the world.

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

#970

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

janalsncm wrote: post #815
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.

Isn’t the fact that Google considers this a bug evidence against exactly what you’re saying? If DEI was really the cause, and not a more broad concern about becoming the next Tay, they would’ve kept it as-is. Weird refusals and paternalistic concerns about harm are not desirable behavior. You can consider it a bug, just like the ChatGPT decoding bug the other day.

I think the thing that makes me totally think this is "Google institutional rot" is there were some reports (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39466135) that lots of people at Google knew this was a problem, but they felt powerless to say something less they be branded "anti-DEI" or some such.

To me the most fundamental symptom of institutional rot is when people stop caring: "Yeah, we know this is insane, but every time I've seen people stick their necks out in the past and say 'You know, that Emperor really looks naked to me', they've been beheaded, so better to just stay quiet. And did you hear there'll be sushi at lunch in the cafeteria today!"

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