Comment by vidarh
1 year ago
And as someone far to the left of a US style "liberal", that is equally offensive and racist as only generating white people. Injecting fake diversity into situations where it is historically inaccurate is just as big a problem as erasing diversity where it exists. The Nazi example is stark, and perhaps too stark, in that spreading fake notions of what they look like seems ridiculous now, but there are more borderline examples where creating the notion that there was more equality than there really was, for example, downplays systematic historical inequities.
I think you'll struggle to find people who want this kind of "diversity*. I certainly don't. Getting something representative matters, but it also needs to reflect reality.
I think you hit on an another important issue:
Do people want the generated images to be representative, or aspirational?
I think there's a large overlap there, in that in media, to ensure an experience of representation you often need to exaggerate minority presence (and not just in terms of ethnicity or gender) to create a reasonable impression, because if you "round down" you'll often end up with a homogeneous mass that creates impressions of bias in the other direction. In that sense, it will often end up aspirational.
E.g. let's say you're making something about a population with 5% black people, and you're presenting a group of 8. You could justify making that group entirely white very easily - you've just rounded down, and plenty of groups of 8 within a population like that will be all white (and some will be all black). But you're presenting a narrow slice of an experience of that society, and not including a single black person without reason makes it easy to create an impression of that population as entirely white.
But it also needs to at scale be representative within plausible limits, or it just gets insultingly dumb or even outright racist, just against a different set of people.
I think you can be aspirational for the future but I can't see how a request for an image in historical context can ever be desired to be aspirational instead of realistic?
On a second thought, maybe for requests like "picture of a crowd cheering signing of the declaration of independence" the exists a big public demand for images that are more diverse than reality was? However, there are many reasons to prefer historical accuracy even here.
Google probably would have gotten a better response to this AI if they only inserted the "make it diverse" prompt clause in a random subset of images. If, say, 10% of nazi images returned a different ethnicity people might just call it a funny AI quirk, and at the same time it would guarantee a minimum level of diversity. And then write some PR like "all training data is affected by systemic racism so we tweaked it a bit and you can always specify what you want".
But this intransparent heavy-handed approach is just absurd and doesn't look good from any angle.
We sort of agree, I think. Almost anything would be better than what they did, though I still think unless you explicitly ask for black nazis, you never ought to get nazis that aren't white, and at the same time, if you explicitly ask for white people, you ought to get them too, of course, given there are plenty of contexts where you will have only white people.
They ought to try to do something actually decent, but in the absence of that not doing the stupid shit they did would have been better.
What they've done both doesn't promote actual diversity, but also serves to ridicule the very notion of trying to address biases in a good way. They picked the crap attempt at an easy way out, and didn't manage to do even that properly.