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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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I just started playing around with Gemini... I would encourage others too and take screen shots. Looks like they did tweak it since last night and I was able to get a white guy first try when asking for a mid-evil knight without a helmet (I also got a topless Native American with a broadsword) and all white Vikings.

I was trying to generate a space marine and it started throwing a fit when I asked for more of the helmeted marine, not the one with pink hair. Apparently this was exclusionary language and not allowed.

Haven't been able to get an image of the First Thanksgiving.

Asked for an image of a pre-Colombian tribe, no racial diversity there but it did give a bunch of morbidly obese Indians.

Asking for images of people eating fired chicken sets off alarm bells but I did get it to create one and it did even have a black guy eating chicken among a racially and sexually diverse group.

So, I spent a solid week last month playing around with different models and constraints in Easy Diffusion, running locally, seeing what I could make it do. It was an interesting experience, and whatever jankiness I experienced was well worth not constantly being told what I was asking for was toxic or offensive. Frankly, the public models have such schizophrenic guard rails, and such insane neoliberal fantasy biases, it's difficult for me to imagine anyone getting anything worth while out of them. And Google is so late to the party on this one, what is even the point, besides launching another product nobody will use, which they will abandon in a year?