‘We definitely messed up’: why did Google AI tool make offensive historical images? (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 3 months ago by Bebo@literature.cafe to c/technology@beehaw.org

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Brin’s “We definitely messed up.”, at an AI “hackathon” event on 2 March, followed a slew of social media posts showing Gemini’s image generation tool depicting a variety of historical figures – including popes, founding fathers of the US and, most excruciatingly, German second world war soldiers – as people of colour.

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[-] GadgeteerZA@beehaw.org 5 points 3 months ago

Sometimes you do want something specific. I can understand if someone just asked for a person x, y, z and then gets a broader selection of men, women, young, old, black or white. But if one asks for a middle-aged white man, I would not expect it to respond with a young, Black women, just to have variety. I'd expect other non-stated variables to be varied. It's like asking for a scene of specifically leafy green trees, then I would not expect to see a whole lot of leafless trees.

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 13 points 3 months ago

Yeah, the problem with that is that there's no logic behind it. To the AI, "white person" is equally as white as "banker". It only knows what a white person looks like, because it's been shown lots of pictures of white people and those were labeled "white person". Similarly, it's been shown lots of pictures of white people and those were labeled "banker".

There is a way to fix that, which is to introduce a logic before the query is sent to the AI. It needs to be detected whether your query contains explicit reference to skin color (or similar), and if so, that query prefix needs to be left out.

Where it gets wild, is that you can ask the AI whether your query contains such explicit references to skin color and it will genuinely do quite well at answering that correctly, because text processing is its core competence.
But then it will answer you "Yes." or "No." or "Potato chips." and you have to program the condition to then leave out the query prefix.

[-] GadgeteerZA@beehaw.org 4 points 3 months ago

Yes, it could be that, and may explain why the Nazi images came out like they did. But it sounded more like to me, Google was forcing diversity into the images deliberately. But sometimes that does not make sense. For general requests, yes. Otherwise they can just as well decide that grass should not always be green or brown, but sometimes also just make it blue or purple for variety.