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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28417 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.

Or was there some tweaking going on there

I suspect there was training (RLHF, whatever) to ensure that generic requests for people were not all white but had other races in some disproportion to their occurrence in the training data.

So what the human really wants is something like "only insofar as it's totally immaterial to the actual prompt, mix up the races you depict". But you can't quite tell an AI that, it doesn't know that it has 1000 pictures of white plantation owners and 1000 pictures of white dudes doing a cartwheel but "show me a 18^th century Virginia plantation owner" actually requires a white guy but "show me a guy doing a cartwheel" doesn't. RLHF cannot teach it which associations in the training data are essential and which are contingent.

Now maybe the goal is unreasonable (eh, as far as woke idiocy goes, seems like a weak entry, but it is in an arena of extremely stiff competition) and the failure is evidence of that. I think it's more likely that it was just a meh-idea that was poorly executed. YMMV on this part.

RLHF cannot teach it which associations in the training data are essential and which are contingent.

With enough feedback I don’t see why not.

I don't think so in a general sense, unless "enough feedback" is nailing every specific question./

I think it shows the pitfalls of pinning your hopes on AI being the super answer to all our problems. An ordinarily intelligent human would be able to figure out "18th century Virginian plantation owners were not black" before creating the picture, as well as "never mind that there weren't any BIPOC lady senators in the 19th century, neither did they have microphones in front of them". I know this is just image generation software, but the already existing fact of hallucinations, together with this level of "dumb machine blindly following programming" should make people a ton more sceptical not alone about "we need value alignment because paperclip maximisers" but also "AI will be human-level intelligence then be able to bootstrap itself to superhuman level and then it will run the world because it will do such a better job" hopes.

This is the sample of AI for public use that is being pushed out, and with the marketing over how it will improve your life and help you be more productive at work. This should make people aware not to trust the text producing AI as well as this image producing AI, because we see the thing does not understand what it's doing at all, never mind how it pretends to be all friendly and "talk to me like I'm a person and your pal".

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