Comment by pton_xd
1 year ago
Google "white family" and count how many non-white families show up in the image results. 8 out of the first 32 images didn't match, for me.
Now, sometimes showing you things slightly outside of your intended search window can be helpful; maybe you didn't really know what you were searching for, right? Whose to say a nudge in a certain direction is a bad thing.
Extrapolate to every sensitive topic.
EDIT: for completeness, google "black family" and count the results. I guess for this term, Google believes a nudge is unnecessary.
google image search "Chief Diversity Officer" and you'll see an extremely un-diverse group of people.
It's true, if you look at Bing and Yahoo you can see the exact same behavior!
> This is conspiratorial thinking at its finest.
Sounds crazy right? I half don't believe it myself, except we're discussing this exact built-in bias with their image generation algorithm.
> No. If you look at any black families in the search results, you'll see that it's keying off the term "white".
Obviously they are keying off alternate meanings of "white" when you use white as a race. The point is, you cannot use white as a race in searches.
Google any other "<race> family", and you get exactly what you expect. Black family, asian family, indian family, native american family. Why is white not a valid race query? Actually, just typing that out makes me cringe a bit, because searching for anything "white" is obviously considered racist today. But here we are, white things are racist, and hence the issues with Gemini.
You could argue that white is an ambiguous term, while asian or indian are less-so, but Google knows what they're doing. Search for "white skinned family" or similar and you actually get even fewer white families.