Comment by duxup
1 year ago
It's very strange that this would leak into a product limitation to me.
I played with Gemini for maybe 10 minutes and I could tell there was clearly some very strange ideas about DEI forced into the tool. It seemed there was a clear "hard coded" ratio of various racial / background required as far as the output it showed me. Or maybe more accurately it had to include specific backgrounds based on how people looked, and maybe some or none of other backgrounds.
What was curious too was the high percentage of people whose look was specific to a specific background. Not any kind of "in-between", just people with one very specific background. Almost felt weirdly stereotypical.
"OH well" I thought. "Not a big deal."
Then I asked Gemini to stop doing that / tried specifying racial backgrounds... Gemini refused.
Tool was pretty much dead to me at that point. It's hard enough to iterate with AI let alone have a high % of it influenced by some prompts that push the results one way or another that I can't control.
How is it that this was somehow approved? Are the people imposing this thinking about the user in any way? How is it someone who is so out of touch with the end user in position to make these decisions?
Makes me not want to use Gemini for anything at this point.
Who knows what other hard coded prompts are there... are my results weighted to use information from a variety of authors with the appropriate backgrounds? I duno ...
If I ask a question about git will they avoid answers that mention the "master" branch?
Any of these seem plausible given the arbitrary nature of the image generation influence.
If you ever wondered what it was like to live during the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, well, we are living in the Western version of that right now. You don't speak out during the revolution for fear of being ostracized, fired, and forced into a struggle session where your character and reputation is publicly destroyed to send a clear message to everyone else.
Shut Up Or Else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Cham...
Historians might mark 2017 as the official date Google was captured.
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.
Yes, but it didn't get there overnight. At what point was it too late to stop? We've already deep into the self-censorship and stuggle session stage. With many large corporations and institutions supporting it.
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That's what everyone thought just before every single horrible thing that happened in history. The Cultural Revolution or, e.g., the Holocaust didn't happen overnight. Things change slightly every day and then afterward you realize that everything has gone wrong, right around when people come knocking on your door.
Agree but we are pretty much spot on in woke mccarthyism territory, which used to be widely understood as a bad thing.
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At least they did something about the landlords.
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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.
This is a very good point and prescient. Apple, Visa/MC/Amex/Discover, Google Play Store, and even internet backbones are extreme monopolies and now that corporate America has been seeded with social justice crusaders they are abusing their power. Most recently the people who own the pipes of the internet as a utility have been waging war on websites like kiwifarms and straight up banning it off of the clearnet for being "transphobic." This is dark stuff.
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.
Survivor's of the Soviet Union, North Korea, and Communist China are all echoing similar warnings about the direction America is heading towards.
https://www.amazon.com/Live-Not-Lies-Christian-Dissidents/dp...
https://www.dailywire.com/news/exactly-like-history-repeatin...
https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-survivor-of-maos-china-...
"This is, indeed, the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”
Given all the evidence available, I find your dismissive and gaslighting attitude highly offensive and disgusting. What's happening to America is deadly serious, and the consequences could be, without any hyperbole, the loss of freedom, peace, and prosperity for the entire world, and the brutal death of millions.
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.
>Are you aware that millions of people were murdered during the actual cultural revolution
Are you aware that the cultural revolution didn't start with this? No successful movement starts with "let's go murder a bunch of our fellow countrymen"; it gradually builds up to it.
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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.
I agree with this. I don’t like new twitter but old twitter had a chokehold on society that did a lot of damage.
And yeah this is a lot of why I really hope trump isn’t elected. It’s going to bolster a far left movement like it did last time, to a really scary degree. That and undoing environmental policy, I feel like it will unravel this country
In all seriousness, I don't think Biden can make it to another term. Even if we assume he gets voted in, he'll likely keel over walking up to the podium for the inauguration. Let the poor old man rest.
Biden is letting a whole ass army of military-age young men into the country and burning all our money in expensive wars that might turn nuclear. He has to be voted out. Besides that, he's so obviously incompetent and senile, it would be a sick joke to keep him in. I figure either way, we're getting trouble. At least if we get someone else, we might have a chance to get our affairs in order, even if there are a few people freaking out about "far right" candidates (aka anyone the uniparty hates).
My perception is Biden is pushing the woke pretty hard. I'm not sure why it would chill under him.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/house-gop-fails-to-ove...
Trump 1.0 triggered the initial woke wave in the first place (he was a catalyst, not a proponent). Trump 2.0 would rather trigger double woke, which will trigger its backlash like woke 1.0 triggered its own backlash.
Biden as president is boring, which is how I like it. But if you want to rile liberals up, nominate or elect Trump president again, it will definitely drive voter turnout if anything else.
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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.
It's evidence of a systematic suppression of white people, with roots in racism and cultural Marxism. Of course you're right that it hasn't escalated out of control yet. Except that whole BLM thing where people burnt down businesses and terrorized cities for months. That's just a taste of what's coming if we don't promote actual tolerance instead of Division Exclusion and Indoctrination.
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Like the ones that would have prevented Google's racist, sexist, ahistorical, anti-West misadventure that this thread is all about?
The strawman meme you cite is designed to keep people afraid and quiet, that's all.
This would be a soviet joke where the punch line is 10 years in the Gulag.
It does seem really strange that the tool refuses specific backgrounds. So if I am trying to make a city scene in Singapore and want all Asians in the background, the tool refuses? On what grounds?
This seems pretty non-functional and while I applaud, I guess, the idea that somehow this is more fair it seems like the legitimate uses for needing specific demographic backgrounds in an image outweigh racists trying to make an uberimage or whatever 1billion:1.
Fortunately, there are competing tools that aren’t poorly built.
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 :)
> :)
An entrepot of the British Empire with as much diversity as New York City if not more.
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It isn't "fair" when it is a misrepresentation of what the user asks for.
> How is it that this was somehow approved?
If the tweets can be believed, Gemini's product lead (Jack Krawzczyk) is very, shall we say, "passionate" about this type of social justice belief. So would not be a surprise if he's in charge of this.
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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GG6e0D6WoAEo0zP?format=jpg&name=...
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"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.
> you make it sound as if he's some sort of silly DEI ideologue
I mean, yes? Saying offensive and wrong things like this: "This is America, where racism is the #1 value our populace seeks to uphold above all..."
and now being an influential leader in AI at one of the most powerful companies on Earth? That deserves some scrutiny.
I love it when sarcastic white men on twitter tell me how just how much they know about DEI. Surely if there's one person that is going to not be over zealous or completely miss the point of inclusivity and diversity... it's a white dude tech bro like the guy we are talking about here! Always nice to know we minorities can count on such saviors to be saved from the perils of... generating pictures of white people.
Ask James Damore what happens when you ask too many questions of the wrong ideology...
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.
> 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
Is that what Damore actually said? That's not my recollection. I think his main point was that due to differences in biology, that women had more extraversion, openness, and neuroticism (big 5 traits) and that women were less likely to want to get into computer stuff. That's a very far cry from him saying something like "women suck at computers" and seems very dishonest to suggest.
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> sending a message to all my coworkers
Damore didn't send anything to all coworkers. He sent a detailed message as part of a very specific conversation with a very specific group on demographic statistics at Google and their causes.
In fact, it was Damore's detractors that published it widely. If it the crime was distribution, and not thoughtcrime, wouldn't they be fired?
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Now, maybe that's not a conversation that should have existed in a workplace in the first place. I'd buy that. But's it's profoundly disingenuous for a company to deliberately invite/host a discussion, then fire anyone with a contrary opinion.
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This is dishonest. what is the point of this comment? Do you feel righteously woke when you write it?
He was pushing back against a communist narrative that: every single demographic gruop should be equally represented in every part of tech; and that if this isn't the case, then it's evidence of racism/sexism/some other modern sin.
Again what was the point of portraying the Damore story like that.
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It has been known for a few years now that Google Image Search has been just as inaccurately biased with clear hard-coded intervention (unless it's using a similarly flawed AI model?) to the point where it is flat out censorship.
For example, go search for "white American family" right now. Out of 25 images, only 3 properly match my search. The rest are either photos of diverse families, or families entirely with POC. Narrowing my search query to "white skinned American family" produces equally incorrect results.
What is inherently disturbing about this is that there are so many non-racist reasons someone may need to search for something like that. Equally disturbing is that somehow, non-diverse results with POC are somehow deemed "okay" or "appropriate" enough to not be subject to the same censorship. So much for equality.
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.
I was aware of the white background results, hence my other example query. Both yielded the same result.
7/25 = 0.28 = 28%. That's awful accuracy. Google would be out of business if their general search accuracy had a similar success rate.
Interesting how "black american family" yields results where not a single person in the result is anything but Black. I suppose Google doesn't think that blended families are possible for this query. Where's that 28% precision rate this time?
How many images with black background or black clothes are there if you use word "black" in the same query?
> Then I asked Gemini to stop doing that / tried specifying racial backgrounds... Gemini refused.
When I played with it, I was getting some really strange results. Almost like it generated an image full of Caucasian people and then tried to adjust the contrast of some of the characters to give them darker skin. The while people looked quite photorealistic, but the black people looked like it was someone's first day with Photoshop.
To which I told it "Don't worry about diversity" and it complied. The new images it produced looked much more natural.
>How is it someone who is so out of touch with the end user in position to make these decisions?
Maybe it's the same team behind Tensorflow? Google tends to like taking the "we know better than users" approach to the design of their software libraries, maybe that's finally leaked into their AI product design.
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.
In addition to my comment about Google Image Search, regular Web Search results are equally biased and censored. There was once a race-related topic trending on X/Twitter that I wanted to read more about to figure out why it was trending. It was a trend started and continuing to be discussed by Black Twitter, so it's not like some Neo-Nazis managed to start trending something terrible.
Upon searching Google with the Hashtag and topic, the only results returned not only had no relevancy to the topic, but it returned results discussing racial bias and the importance of diversity. All I wanted to do was learn what people on Twitter were discussing, but I couldn't search anything being discussed.
This is censorship.
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.
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