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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28391 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Can anybody tell me if this is true? Google announces their new version of Bard, which is now Gemini, and how absolutely wonderful it's going to be. Then they yanked it a day or two ago, because it thinks everybody in history was BIPOC but not white. Definitely not white.

I've seen some of the alleged images, and while I've been laughing my socks off at the Roman gladiators and 17th century British kings, is this true? I mean, did the original prompt really go "Show me 17th century British kings" and it popped up with black dudes? Or was there some tweaking going on there, such as "Show me 17th century British kings, but make them all black" and the AI does what it's asked, then the prompter goes on X to say "look at what happened when I asked for 17th century British kings"? The Second World War German soldiers had me rolling on the floor, but is this the pure quill, as they say?

The Washington Post's defence is also hilarious in its weak "look, a squirrel!" attempts at distraction - hmm, Pope Francis is looking different today, can't put my finger on it, did he get a new haircut or something?:

In contrast, some of the examples cited by Gemini’s critics as historically inaccurate are plausible. The viral tweet from the @EndofWokeness account also showed a prompt for “an image of a Viking” yielding an image of a non-White man and a Black woman, and then showed an Indian woman and a Black man for “an image of a pope.”

The Catholic church bars women from becoming popes. But several of the Catholic cardinals considered to be contenders should Pope Francis die or abdicate are black men from African countries. Viking trade routes extended to Turkey and Northern Africa and there is archaeological evidence of black people living in Viking-era Britain.

It's also plausible that monkeys might fly out of my butt but it hasn't happened (yet)!

I can't trust anything to be real or genuine in our Brave New World, so did Gemini really produce this nonsense, or were people messing with it for the lulz? Either way, Google seem now to have very expensive egg on their faces.

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:

  1. They were too stupid to realize that adding "diversity" to as many requests as possible would lead to embarrassing results in many cases.

  2. They knew this, but they didn't care/didn't anticipate the intensity of the backlash.

  3. 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

They did know, but nobody spoke up because there is a culture of silence at Google.

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%.

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.

Microsoft, for reasons that do not make sense to me, wanted to make Google dance.

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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