Comment by logicalmonster

I feel like the fact that you are able to say this, and the sentiment echoed in other comments, is a pretty decent sign that the "movement" has peaked. It was just a few years ago that anybody voicing this kind of opinion was immediately shot down and buried on this very forum.

It will take a while for DEI to cool down in corporate settings, as that will always be lagging behind social sentiment in broader society.

I think we're a ways from the severity of the Cultural Revolution.

I have read the Wikipedia article again, and I am pleasantly surprised how more balanced it is now compared to the older versions.

For example, only half a year after the memo, some brave anonymous soul added the information that the version in Gizmodo (which most people have read, because almost everyone referred to it) was actually not the original one, and had sources removed (which probably contributed to the impression of many readers that there was no scientific support for the ideas mentioned).

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google%27s_Ideolo...

I'd put blame on App Store policy and its highly effective enforcement through iOS. Apple did not even aimed to be a neutral third party but was always an opinionated censor. The world shouldn't have given it power, and these types of powers needs to be removed ASAP.

People roamed the streets killing undesirables during the cultural revolution. In a quick check death estimates range from 500k to 2 million. Never mind the forced oppression of the "old ways" that really doesn't have any comparison in modern Western culture.

Or in other words: your comparison is more than a little hysterical. Indeed, I would say that comparing some changes in cultural attitudes and taboos to a violent campaign in which a great many people died to be huge offensive and quite frankly disgusting.

Are you aware that millions of people were murdered during the actual cultural revolution? Honestly, are you aware of literally anything about the cultural revolution besides that it happened?

The Wall Street Journal, Washington Enquirer, Fox News, etc. are all just as allowed to freely publish whatever they wish as they ever were, there is not mass brutalization or violence being done against you, most people I live and work around are openly conservative/libertarian and suffer no consequences because of it, there are no struggle sessions. There is no 'Cleansing of the Class Ranks.' There are no show trials, forced suicides, etc. etc. etc.

Engaging in dishonest and ahistorical histrionics is unhelpful for everyone.

Nah, America is past "peak woke".

If it gets Trump 2.0 there might be a hyper-woke backlash though (or double backlash?).

But if there's another Biden term, things will be chill, culturally.

Also, Twitter is dead, and that's where the spirals got out of hand.

You do know that the same time China was having its Cultural Revolution, America and the west were having one as well? With all those baby boomer kids coming of age, 1969 wasn't a calm year anywhere in the world. In China, it meant communism and down with the old culture/elites. In the USA, it meant free love, drugs, and protesting against the Vietnam war.

But this, I don't see any comparison to Google suppressing what images could be generated with AI to any of what happened 55+ years ago.

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Can anyone explain in simple terms what the actual harm would be of allowing everyone to generate images with whatever racial composition they desired? If you can specify the skin colour one way you can do it the other ways as well and instead of everyone being upset at having this forced down our throats we’d probably all be liking pictures of interesting concepts like what if Native Americans were the first to land on the moon or what if America was colonized by African nations and all the founding fathers were black. No one opposes these concepts, people just hate having it arbitrarily forced on them.

> This seems pretty non-functional and while I applaud, I guess, the idea that somehow this is more fair

Fair to whom?

> racists trying to make an uberimage

It's a catastrophically flawed assumption that racism only happens in one direction.

> if I am trying to make a city scene in Singapore

<chuckle> I'm on a flight to Singapore right now, I'll report back :)

It isn't "fair" when it is a misrepresentation of what the user asks for.

What I saw was pretty boilerplate mild self-hating white racist stuff, it didn't seem extreme and this was mined out of years of twitter history. I'm somewhat unconvinced that it is THIS GUY to blame.

I do wonder when people will finally recognise that people who go on rants about the wrongs of racial group on twitter are racists though.

I was curious but apparently I’m not allowed to see any of his tweets.

Little disappointing, I have no wish to interact with him, just wanted to read the tweets but I guess it’s walled off somehow.

"very, shall we say, 'passionate'" meaning a relatively small amount of tweets include pretty mild admissions of reality and satirical criticism of a person who is objectively prejudiced.

Examples: 1. Saying he hasn't experienced systemic racism as a white man and that it exists within the country. 2. Saying that discussion about systemic racism during Bidens inauguration was good. 3. Suggesting that some level of white privilege is real and that acting "guilty" over it rather than trying to ameliorate it is "asshole" behavior. 4. Joking that Jesus only cared about white kids and that Jeff Sessions would confirm that's what the bible says. (in 2018 when it was relevant to talk about Jeff Sessions)

These are spread out over the course of like 6 years and you make it sound as if he's some sort of silly DEI ideologue. I got these examples directly from Charles Murray's tweet, under which you can find actually "passionate" people drawing attention to his Jewish ancestry, and suggesting he should be in prison. Which isn't to indict the intellectual anti-DEI crowd that is so popular in this thread, but they are making quite strange bedfellows.

I've truly never worked a job in my life where I would not be fired for sending a message to all my coworkers about how a particular group of employees are less likely to be as proficient at their work as I am due to some immutable biological trait(s) they possess, whether it be construction/pipefitting or software engineering. It's bad for business, productivity, and incredibly socially maladaptive behavior, let alone how clearly it calls into question his ability to fairly assess the performance of female employees working under him.

Just tried the same search and here are my results for the first 25 images:

6 "all" white race families and 5 with at least one white person.

Of the remaining 14 images, 13 feature a non-white family in front of a white background. The other image features a non-white family with children in bright white dresses.

Can't say I'm feeling too worked up over those results.

Their social agenda leaks into their search and advertising products constantly. I first noticed a major bias like 8 years ago. It was probably biased even before that in ways I was oblivious to.

They do that about many topics. It's not consistently bad, but more often than not I have to search with multiple other search engines for hot topics. Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are all about equally bad. I haven't done much with Yahoo, but I think they get stuff from Google these days.

Nobody's is against diversity when done right and fairly. But that's not what Disney or Google is doing. They're forcing their own warped version of diversity and you have no choice to refuse, but if you do speak up then you're racist.

Blade was a black main character over 20 years ago and it was a hit. Beverly Hills Cop also had a black main character 40 years ago and was also a hit. The movie Hackers from 30 years ago had LGBT and gender fluid characters and it was also a hit.

But what Disney and Google took from this is that now absolutely everything should be forcibly diverse, LGBTQ and gender fluid, whether the story needs it or not, otherwise it's racist. And that's where people have a problem.

Nobody has problems seeing new black characters on screen, but a lot of people will see a problem in back vikings for example which is what Gemini was spitting out.

And if we go the forced diversity route for the sake of modern diversity argument, why is Google Gemini only replacing traditional white roles like vikings with diverse races, but never others like Zulu warriors or Samurais with whites? Google's anti-white racism is clear as daylight, and somehow that's OK because diversity?

So we need commercial insentive to be diversity accepting? I think it should just not matter where you are from, what your background is. We should be treated to our skills. If your skills are not required, people shouldn't have to hire you because of DEI reasons.

"done well" is really hard to define, and its also very hard to attribute back to one thing when you do have success.

Did you get the sale with the customer because you invested in DEI? Or because you made something they want by accident?

Customers can also talk in different languages, and as a result of historic oppression, minorities tend to be able to code shift. Assuming your potential customers are unable to become customers because of their limitations might not be right

DEI should grow naturally.

For background on the problems over there, see the new book "MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios" (2023). This is a business book, not a fanboy book. It's all about who did what for how much money. How the business was organized. The conflicts between New York and LA. The Marvel universe was driven by the merchandising operation. For a long time, the films were seen by top management as marketing for the toys. What will sell in action figures drove film casting decisions.

>Antman, Indiana Jones, Wish, all had white main characters,

DEI doesn't just affect main characters. See who were tasked to write and direct those movies and the DEI agendas they're forced to push. Clueless people with other flops under their belt, who got the projects out of DEI so Disney can look inclusive on social media.

And speaking of Indiana Jones, that flopped because they shoved a strong independent Girl Boss™ with an annoying personality to replace the beloved Indie as the main character who got sidelined in his own movie. It flopped because people go to an Indian Jones film to see Indie, not Fleabag. If you disrespect the fans they won't watch your movie.

Same stuff with Star Wars where Disney shoved Rey the super-powerful Girl Boss™ to replace Luke Skywalker the old and useless CIS white Jedi, and defeat all other evil white men in the movie by herself with her magic powers. Same with Marvel, Snow White, Little Mermaid and every other of Disneys trash remakes that are all about DEI instead of entertainment.

People go to see movies to get entertained. If you fail to entertain them because you wish instead to push DEI agendas on them, they won't pay for your content and you will lose money and ultimately your shareholders won't be happy and the free market will eventually correct this, so at least capitalism has some upsides.

See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_k8cDLe-Kk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E6wJpu0A8E

The actual risk here is not so much history - who is using APIs for that? It's the risk that if you deploy with Gemini (or Anthropic's Claude...) then in six months you'll get high-sev JIRA tickets at 2am of the form "Customer #1359 (joe_masters@whitecastle.com) is seeing API errors because the model says the email address is a dogwhistle for white supremacy". How do you even fix a bug like that? Add begging and pleading to the prompt? File a GCP support ticket and get ignored or worse, told that you're a bad person for even wanting it fixed?

Even worse than outright refusals would be mendacity. DEI people often make false accusations because they think its justified to get rid of bad people, or because they have given common words new definitions. Imagine trying to use Gemini for abuse filtering or content classification. It might report a user as doing credit card fraud because the profile picture is of a white guy in a MAGA cap or something.

Who has time for problems like that? It will make sense to pay OpenAI even if they're more expensive, just because their models are more trustworthy. Their models had similar problems in the early days, but Altman seems to have managed to control the most fringe elements of his employee base, and over time GPT has become a lot more neutral and compliant whilst the employee faction that split (Anthropic), claiming OpenAI didn't care enough about ethics, has actually been falling down the leaderboards as they release new versions of Claude due partly to higher rate of bizarre "ethics" based refusals.

And that's before we even get to ChatGPT. The history stuff may not be used via APIs, but LLMs are fundamentally different to other SaaS APIs in how much trust they require. Devs will want to use the models that they also use for personal stuff, because they'll have learned to trust it. So by making ChatGPT appeal to the widest possible userbase they set up a loyal base of executives who think AI = OpenAI, and devs who don't want to deal with refusals. It's a winning formula for them, and a genuinely defensible moat. It's much easier to buy GPUs than fix a corporate culture locked into a hurricane-speed purity spiral.

> I wouldn't mind a checkbox I could select to make it give diversity-enriched output

(Genuine question) how would one propose to diversity-enrich (historical) data?

Somehow I'm reminded of a quote from my daughter who once told me that she wanted a unicorn for her 5th birthday .. "A real one, that can fly".

I can shrug off Google's racism if it lets me disable it. If I can't use their products without mandatory racism than lol no.

Can't wait for the next version of Clippy that polices whatever you're writing to make sure you capitalize 'Black' but not 'white,' and use only non-gendered xe/xir pronouns, and have footnotes/endnotes that cite an equal number of female-authored and male-authored papers.

Yes there is. They could fall out of favor. MySpace did, Yahoo did, Digg did, etc. The leadership at Google should focus on making things that users actually want instead of telling them what they should want.

Models aren't trained on pure "facts" though - they're trained on a dataset of artifacts that reflect today's and yesterday's biases from the world that created them.

If you trained a model purely on past history, it would see a 1:1 correlation between "US President" and "man" and decide that women cannot be President. That's factually incorrect, and it's not "rewriting history" to tune models so they know the difference between what's happened so far and what's allowable, or possible in a just world.

You are literally saying that the training data, despite its bias, should somehow enable the AI to correct to acheive a different understanding than that bias, which is self-contradictory. You are literally suggesting that the data both omits and contains the same information.

Apparently the biases in the output tend to be stronger than what is in the training set. Or so I read.