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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

#991

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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…

Nah, America is past "peak woke". If it gets Trump 2.0 there might be a hyper-woke backlash though (or double backlash?). But if there's another Biden term, things will be chill, culturally. Also, Twitter is dead, and that's where the spirals got out of hand.

My perception is Biden is pushing the woke pretty hard. I'm not sure why it would chill under him.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/house-gop-fails-to-ove...

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

#992

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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…

But why give those two examples? Why didn't you use an example of a "Professional Athlete"? There is no problem with these examples if you assume that the person wants the statistically likely example... this is ML after all, this is exactly how it works. If I ask you to think of a Elephant, what color do you think of? Wouldn't you expect an AI image to be the color you thought of?

If you ask it to produce an example 100 times you would expect it to match the overall distribution, not produce the most common example 100 times.

Leaving race aside, if you asked it to produce a picture of a person, it would be _weird_ if every single person it produced was the _exact same height_.

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

#993

That is certainly embarassing. But in the same time, I think it is a debate worth having. What corrections to the training dataset biases are acceptable. Is it acceptable to correct the answer to the query "Eminent scientist" from 95% men, 5% woment to 50%/50% or to the current ratio of men/women in science ? Should we correct the ratio of black to white people in answering a generic question to average across the gl…

We aren't talking about ratios here. The ratio is 100% not white, no matter what you ask for. We know it's messed up bad because it will sometimes verbally refuse to generate white people, but it replies enthusiastically for any other race. If people are getting upset about the proportion of whatever race in the results of a query, a simple way to fix it is to ask them to specify the number and proportions they want.…

It is 100% white if you ask for something that is a negative stereotype, like "a family eating fried chicken".

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

#994

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of when black people in the UK get called African American by Americans. No they're neither African nor American It's an incredibly self-centered view of the world

Elon Musk is a real African American

Elon Musk is not considered African-American according to the popular usage of the term as he is of European descent despite being born in South Africa. Lebron James is a real African-American.

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

#995

That is certainly embarassing. But in the same time, I think it is a debate worth having. What corrections to the training dataset biases are acceptable. Is it acceptable to correct the answer to the query "Eminent scientist" from 95% men, 5% woment to 50%/50% or to the current ratio of men/women in science ? Should we correct the ratio of black to white people in answering a generic question to average across the gl…

> Is it acceptable to correct the answer to the query "Eminent scientist" from 95% men, 5% woment to 50%/50% or to the current ratio of men/women in science ? Should we correct the ratio of black to white people in answering a generic question to average across the globe or US ? I would expect AI to at least generate answers consistent with reality. If I ask for a historical figure who just happens to be white, AI ne…

Yep, and I would say more broadly speaking if I ask for pictures of vikings, I would expect 100% of them to be white.

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

#996

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Why is bias a problem? When you prompt "business man" and it outputs a white man, this is quite probably reflective of representation in reality. Whether this overrepresentation is even a problem at all is debatable as the idea that every job, role or subgroup of people is perfectly diverse or that this even should be the goal isn't just ridiculous, it's demographically impossible. If you do have a problem with a spe…

Which reality? For sure "business man" being 100% white is not a reality for some people in Africa and Asia, don't you think?

Google barely makes any money from Africa (relatively speaking). They are a non-factor from a shareholder standpoint. From a shareholder standpoint, the North American, European, Australian, and Japanese markets are top of mind.

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

#997

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Must be an American thing. In Canada, when I think software engineer I think a pretty diverse group with men and women and a mix of races, based on my time in university and at my jobs

Which part of Canada? When I lived in Toronto there was this diversity you described but when I moved to Vancouver everyone was either Asian or white

Alberta

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

#998
post #949
post #743

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If you look at attempts to actively rewrite history, they have to because a hypothetical model trained only on facts would produce results that they won't like

Models aren't trained on pure "facts" though - they're trained on a dataset of artifacts that reflect today's and yesterday's biases from the world that created them. If you trained a model purely on past history, it would see a 1:1 correlation between "US President" and "man" and decide that women cannot be President. That's factually incorrect, and it's not "rewriting history" to tune models so they know the differ…

Maybe it would have the Constitution thrown in there also and figure out that "women cannot be President" is untrue? Sort of like in the real world.

Because otherwise, I guess I agree, you only know that you are taught and presented; AI especially because there is no intelligence in it whatsoever, only endless if blocks tuned for correlation.

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

#999

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Fortune 500s are laughably insincere and hamfisted in how they do DEI. But these types of comments feel like schadenfreude towards the "woke moralist mind-virus" But lets be real here ... DEI is a good thing when done well. How are you going to talk to the customer when they are speaking a different cultural language. Even form a purely capitalist perspective, having a diverse workforce means you can target more mark…

Nobody's is against diversity when done right and fairly. But that's not what Disney or Google is doing. They're forcing their own warped version of diversity and you have no choice to refuse, but if you do speak up then you're racist. Blade was a black main character over 20 years ago and it was a hit. Beverly Hills Cop also had a black main character 40 years ago and was also a hit. The movie Hackers from 30 years…

In the case of Disney, how much of the frustration comes from the fact that their entire success was built on “borrowing” European folk tales? So that now when they lazily remake those same stories with non-white casting, it causes an uproar? I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be focussing more on actually storytelling over DEI, but I also don’t think white people get as upset over movies based on non-white source material, or created whole-cloth.

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

#1000

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which reality? For sure "business man" being 100% white is not a reality for some people in Africa and Asia, don't you think?

Google barely makes any money from Africa (relatively speaking). They are a non-factor from a shareholder standpoint. From a shareholder standpoint, the North American, European, Australian, and Japanese markets are top of mind.

Japanese, which is in... asia.
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