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Zvi has a pretty good writeup. I haven't used the tool, but from all the evidence, it looks like any time a picture of a human being was requested, it literally appended a bunch of diversity words ("Black", "Latina", "Middle Eastern", but never "White") to the user's request without notice or permission before feeding the prompt into the image generator. Hence, female popes and black Vikings. I see three possibilities:
They were too stupid to realize that adding "diversity" to as many requests as possible would lead to embarrassing results in many cases.
They knew this, but they didn't care/didn't anticipate the intensity of the backlash.
They did know, but nobody spoke up because there is a culture of silence at Google.
Should have read all the way down before writing a duplicate response. This is exactly it, but I think what was also not appreciated is that they obviously didn't intend to add "Middle Eastern" to "picture of a 18^th century Virginia plantation owner" or "picture of Caesar crossing the Rubicon" or "SS trooper interrogating a prisoner".
So yeah, I think it's a combination of (1) and (4) It's really hard to teach an AI which imagines it can safely add diversity to and which it cannot
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It's not so much as a culture as the incentives encourage it. It's dream job. Imagine growing up poor or lower middle class and now being in the top .1-1%.
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So it is real. And that post by Zvi is hilarious - diverse leprechauns? I need to see this! - but also alarming. They're meddling with user requests, not simply to avoid hate speech or other thoughtcrimes, but to 'correct' them. So ask for a plain prompt of "two people standing in a field" and they add in random "black/Asian/Native American/wheelchair user" to the prompt.
I don't know what all this says for the hopes of people who expect AI to zoom in intelligence and become super-human and solve all our problems, but it fits with my own grumpy suspicions: AI, if it does destroy us, won't be because it became conscious and decided paperclipping was the way to go, it'll be because stupid, greedy humans misused a dumb 'smart' machine.
I would suggest reasons include this.
I wonder what Microsoft is doing? They're pushing "download the Copilot app on your Android phone" on me and I'm resisting, but this sort of shenanigans makes me reconsider; can I ask Copilot for diverse leprechauns? and if I do, will it give them to me?
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