Comment by PurpleRamen
1 year ago
I'm curious whether this is on purpose. Either as a PR-stunt to get some attention. Or to cater to certain political people. Or even as a prank related to the previous problems with non-white-people being underrepresented in face-recognition and generators. Because in light of those problems, the problem and reactions are very funny to me.
Of course it was on purpose. It was to cater to certain political people. Being white is a crime in 2020, didn't you hear?
Not sure if you heard but the current year is actually 2024.
It wasn't on purpose that it caused controversy. While the PC generation was clearly purposeful, with system prompts that force a cultural war in hilarious ways, it wasn't on purpose that they caused such a problem that they're having to retreat. Google's entrant was guaranteed to get huge attention regardless, and it's legitimately a good service.
Any generative AI company knows that lazy journalists will pound on a system until you can generate some image that offends some PC sensitivity. Generate negative context photos and if it features a "minority", boom mega-sensation article.
So they went overboard.
And Google almost got away with it. The ridiculous ahistorical system prompts (but only where it was replacing "whites"...if you ask for Samurai or an old Chinese streetscape, or an African village, etc, it suddenly didn't care so much for diversity) were noticed by some, but that was easy to wave off as those crazy far righters. It was only once it created diverse Nazis that Google put a pause on it. Which is...hilarious.