Comment by janalsncm
1 year ago
Isn’t the fact that Google considers this a bug evidence against exactly what you’re saying? If DEI was really the cause, and not a more broad concern about becoming the next Tay, they would’ve kept it as-is.
Weird refusals and paternalistic concerns about harm are not desirable behavior. You can consider it a bug, just like the ChatGPT decoding bug the other day.
Saying it's a bug is them trying to save face. They went out of their way to rewrite people's prompts after all. You don't have 100+ programmers stumble in the hallway and put all that code in by accident, come on now.
I think the thing that makes me totally think this is "Google institutional rot" is there were some reports (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39466135) that lots of people at Google knew this was a problem, but they felt powerless to say something less they be branded "anti-DEI" or some such.
To me the most fundamental symptom of institutional rot is when people stop caring: "Yeah, we know this is insane, but every time I've seen people stick their necks out in the past and say 'You know, that Emperor really looks naked to me', they've been beheaded, so better to just stay quiet. And did you hear there'll be sushi at lunch in the cafeteria today!"
They released it like this because people inside Google were too afraid to speak out against it. Only now that people outside the company are shouting that the emperor is naked do they seem to suddenly notice the obvious.
It's not a bug, it's a feature! A bug is when something unintentionally doesn't work or misbehaves. The DEI algorithm is intentionally added as a feature. It just has some output that seems buggy, but is actually because of this "feature". Whether it's a good feature is another discussion though ;).
Some people have pointed out that this is more or less consistent with other of google’s policies. I tested one last night to see if it was true. Go to google images and type “Asian couple”. You get 100% Asian couples. Black couple, 100% black couples. Type in white couple, you get something like 40% white couples
The bug is Gemini's bias being blatant and obvious. The fix will be making it subtle and concealed.
The public outcry is the bug. Or alternatively, if all of your customers hate it, it's not WAI even if it's WAI. It's a bug.