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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28385 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, 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?

There's a number of layers to this AI thing.

The most trivial answer is that current-gen image-generators-as-a-service use prompt preprocessing, expanding a prompt via an LLM to narrow down its possible interpretations by the diffusion model downstream. For example, if you write a cartoon cat holding a balloon, what the image generator gets as input is The image shows a cheerful cartoon cat standing on its hind legs and holding a large, round balloon. The cat has exaggerated features, including large, expressive eyes and a small, upturned nose, which give it a friendly and playful appearance. Its fur is soft and fluffy, with a natural-looking color and texture. The balloon is brightly colored and has a pattern or design on it, adding visual interest to the image. The balloon is filled with a light, airy substance and has a string or ribbon attached to it that the cat is holding onto. The cat is wearing simple clothing that is appropriate for a playful, carefree character. The background is a solid color, making the cat and balloon the main focus of the image. The overall tone of the image is cheerful and carefree. The image is well-lit and has a high level of detail, with clean lines and smooth shading.

This expansion happens according to simple natural language guidelines some girl (or at least I believe it was a girl) at Google has manually written. It so happens (guess why; here's a surprisingly charitable explanation about mode collapse) that the guidelines included aggressively injecting diversity into images with humans. Due to hallucinations we don't know the actual text, but prompt extractions yield something in this vein:

To expand the range of images, I internally adjust the prompt in a few ways: • Keywords: I might add words like "diverse," "inclusive," or specify ethnicities ("South Asian," "Black," etc.), and genders ("female," "non-binary") alongside the word "leprechaun."

Another layer is that, yeah, Google has rigged up the reinforcement learning preference dataset and/or the pretraining dataset such that Gemini-chat version is genuinely very progressively minded even without any images involved, and this might have nontrivial effect on its behind-the-scenes prompt expansions.

There's more to say of Google's deepening crisis of managerial competence, woke true believers among higher-ups (aggressive recruiting and promotion to counteract the disparity Damore had so plainly explained has yielded the desired effect, I guess), and…

All in all it doesn't matter. Gemini 1.5 is a superior product to OpenAI's, the next version will be competitive with GPT-5, Google's shipping engine has finished revving up, and we'll be getting fed more of this bullshit from now on.

but prompt extractions yield something in this vein:

Looks like this part got eaten.

I lost interest assuming someone else will post it. Anyway, fixed

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