If 95% of publicly available images of a profession are of one gender, should the tool be deliberately modified so that it's X% instead?
I totally agree that models that purport to represent the world can be hugely biased and reconfirming of negative biases, but how would avoiding representing those biases be achieved? Strict gender ratios in training data?
Here's one way... Given a text description, sample from the space of /more restrictive/ text descriptions (eg, add adjectives) and then draw pictures for those. Then modify the sampling space over more descriptive sentences to equalize on gender or other axes.
Stock photos have the same problem, where asking for a profession or a category will give mostly one kind of representation, and it’s up to the user to go dig further to find different representations.
DALL-E being on par with stock photos biases could seem benign, but it also means these issues get propagated further more down the line, and the more AI generated images get popular, the worse it gets cemented (“it has always been that way”) and could actually displace niches where better images were being used until then.
It’s a problem is that right now there’s only one option (reflect the training set with a bias towards the most common cases).
If you ask for a female US president, should the application simply return a black screen?
If you ask for a black US president, would you expect it to only ever return pictures of Barack Obama?
Uncle, Prince, Sire, and Duke come immediately to mind. Most of their feminine cognates end in consonants.
Unfortunately it's not a great example with which to make this point. Before Florence Nightingale, a nurse was a person who was employed to suckle your babies. Of course 100% were female.
Wet nurse was a later coining to differentiate the two meanings.
But you're right, is somebody's finger or faulty data on the scales?
Because that's how you get a bumper bowling world laser light show clown world instead of life.
The metaphor isn't perfect, and cuts several ways, but it's what my mind came up with.
This demo toy just pushes the bias right in your face and makes the invisible visible, which could be very useful for highlighting the problem for lawmakers.