Comment by ermir
1 year ago
It's more accurate to say that it's designed to construct an ideal reality rather than represent the actually existing one. This is the root of many of the cultural issues that the West is currently facing.
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. - Marx
If it constructed an ideal reality it'd refuse to draw nazis etc. entirely.
It's certainly designed to try to correct for biases, but in doing so sloppily they've managed to make it if anything more racist by falsifying history in ways that e.g. downplays a whole lot of evil by semi-erasing the effects of it from their output.
Put another way: Either don't draw nazis, or draw historically accurate nazis. Don't draw nazis (at least not without very explicit prompting - I'm not a fan of outright bans) that erases their systemic racism.
but the issue here is that it's not a ideal reality, an ideal reality would be fully multicultural and in acceptance of all cultures, here we are presented with a reality where an ethnicity has been singled out and intentionally cancelled, suppressed and underrepresented.
you may be arguing for an ideal and fair multicultural representation, but it's not what this sistem is representing.
it's impossible to reach an ideal reality immediately, and also out of nowhere: there's this thing called history. Google is just _trying_.
even assuming it's a bona fide attempt to reach an ideal state, trying doesn't insulate from criticism.
that said, I struggle to see how the targeted cancellation of one specific culture would reconcile as a bona fide attempt at multiculturalism
> construct an ideal reality rather than represent the actually existing one
If I ask to generate an image of a couple, would you argue that the system's choice should represent "some ideal" which would logically mean other instances are not ideal?
If the image is of a white woman and a black man, if I am a lesbian Asian couple, how should I interpret that? If I ask for it to generate an image of image of two white gays kissing and it refuses because it might cause harm or some such nonsense, is it not invalidating who I am as a young white gay teenager? If I'm a black African (vs. say a Chinese African or a white African), I would expect a different depiction of a family than the one American racist ideology would depict because my reality is not that and your idea of what ideal is is arrogant and paternalistic (colonial, racist, if you will).
Maybe the deeper underlying bug in human makeup is that we categorize things very rigidly, probably due to some evolutionary advantage, but it can cause injustice when we work towards a society where we want your character to be judged, not your identity.
I personally think that the generated images should reflect reality as it is. I understand that many think this is philosophically impossible, and at the end of the day humans use judgement and context to solve these problems.
Philosophically you can dilute and destroy the meaning of terms, and AI that has no such judgement can't generate realistic images. If you ask for an image of "an American family" you can assault the meaning of "American" and "family" to such an extent that you can produce total nonsense. This is a major problems for humans as well, I don't expect AI to be able to solve this anytime soon.
> I personally think that the generated images should reflect reality as it is.
That would be a reasonable default and one that I align with. My peers might say it perpetuates stereotypes and so here we are as a society, disagreeing.
FWIW, I actually personally don't care what is depicted because I have a brain and can map it to my worldview, so I am not offended when someone represents humans in a particular way. For some cases it might be initially jarring and I need to work a little harder to feel a connection, but once again, I have a brain and am resilient.
Maybe we should teach people resilience while also drive towards a more just society.
Eww