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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?:
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.
A lot of people are saying that Google's engineers must be pretty stupid not to have noticed this before release.
What if they aren't? What if they did this on purpose?
I propose a Straussian reading of this whole affair. Google engineers who have a problem with wokeness can't speak out against it. The only acceptable criticism is the 50-Stalins criticism, that we haven't gone far enough, that we need more wokeness. So I think this is a 50-Stalins-style protest. I think it's a deliberate act of accelerationism to highlight the absurdity of trying to apply this style of heavy handed censorship to AI.
I think Google's engineers are protesting their leadership by giving them exactly what they asked for, and everything that comes with it.
I suspect this is not the case, and that everyone involved in this project was all-in on wokeness. They didn't see a problem because to them, this is not a problem. This was likely some woke AI group going off on their own, intended to produce a product for the glory of their PM, which would then be forgotten after the PM got a promotion as so many other Google products have been. Then Google higher-ups realized Microsoft/OpenAI had stolen a march on them, so they had to release. If they allowed this thing to be seen internally first (and it's quite likely they did not), they likely deflected all criticism with threats and admonitions about how the team worked hard on it so don't criticize. The higher ups either didn't pay attention or (just as likely) were fully on-board with the wokeness. Then release, to a world that's still a half-a-step behind their vanguard. Oops.
To me the most plausible claim you make is that all is all internal feedback would have been deflected. (I'd also give you the claim that all would have been forgotten after the PM got a promotion, except that unfortunately for then the promo cycle is a lot slower than the media cycle...)
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