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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

This could indeed be a wrapper for something like Dall-E 2. Like the latter, they seem to occasionally force some images to be (what US Americans consider) "diverse", i.e. making figures black even when it makes no sense.

The results can be quite disturbing:

https://www.bing.com/images/create/princess-peach2c-portrait...

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As a non-American please could someone explain what exactly should I be disturbed about? I’ve no idea.

edit: Missed the prompt. Yeah not what I’d expect Princess Peach to be.

Is it disturbing though?

To me? No, it looks wrong, but not really disturbing.

Which is why I asked the question - maybe I’m lacking awareness of a particular piece of American culture which should make me disturbed?

No, OP just chose a more changed word instead of the appropriate one.

Don't you notice that the face looks messed up? Whatever forces the change in skin color seems to also degrade image quality.

Sure? But that means it looks wrong not disturbing. It's like some messed up drawing it not uncanny valley

Well perhaps it is more jarring in comparison: https://www.bing.com/images/create/princess-peach2c-portrait...

> Whatever forces the change in skin color seems to also degrade image quality.

Your statement is both authoritative and non-specific:why are you certain about the causality and that there is a force other than the training data and PRNG seed?

PRNG?

Pseudo-random number generator

There are some other Princess Peach examples below where the "diverse" induced characters also have worse quality, though not as bad as here.

Edit: That OpenAI in fact artificially induces "diverse" characters is nothing new, this was already a special early "feature" of Dall-E 2.

"Powered by an advanced version of the DALL∙E model from our partners at OpenAI"

Where is this quote from?

Edit: Found it. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/21/create-images-wi...

Assuming they didn't change it, they literally randomly add "black" to the end of many prompts to make it more "diverse". So here you got Princes Peach black.

I put in "Princess Peach" prompt and got this: https://www.bing.com/images/create/princess-peach/641a332132...

I think the "diverse" force doesn't just occasionally introduce dark skin, but also sometimes black hair or fat people. Here is an example which, like your case, has two with black hair and one overweight:

https://www.bing.com/images/create/princess-peach2c-by-edwar...

I think normally (without diversity intervention) a Princess Peach would always be generated as a slim white blonde, given that this is the canonical look.

Two other examples, which seem to confirm the above:

https://www.bing.com/images/create/princess-peach2c-by-henri...

https://www.bing.com/images/create/princess-peach2c-self-por...

Since some people seem to suspect racism, here are the other three faces of the same prompt, which are non-deformed: https://www.bing.com/images/create/princess-peach2c-portrait...

Are brown squirrels disturbing?

It's a rodent-monkey hybrid

You have to be really racist to find the racial coding of that image to be in, like, the top 10 most disturbing things.

Like, anatomy?

Yeah, anatomy. The figure doesn't even have a mouth.

That result is hardly disturbing. Christ. There’s being anti-woke but this is just being racist.

I find the picture to be quite disturbing, though not because of the skin color.

Right, but it's no more disturbing than the average mis-aligned output from DALLE-2. (Princess Peach is humanoid, not a squirrel).

The parent comment is welcome to correct me, but given the context of their comment I feel like it should be flagged. At the very least for inciting a toxic flamewar; but really it's just racist.

This isn't 4chan.

HN guideline: Assume good faith.

That's why I said "the commenter is welcome to correct me" and "at the very least...".

I'm gonna avoid this thread for now, in any case. Don't need someone telling me I'm a triggered snowflake.

"Assuming good faith" certainly doesn't mean "assuming bad faith unless the author explicitly denies bad faith".

Honestly one of the most impressively racist comments I’ve seen on this website

Consider that you might be seeing racism where none exists.

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