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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

So did you run this 20 or 50 times and can you give us the statistical distribution of the races?

And are you sure that what you perceive as a lower quality image is related to the race of the astronaut at all, having similarly tested it 20 or 50 times?

Because concluding that Google is doing a "hamfisted" job at ensuring diversity is going to require a lot more evidence than your description of just three images. Especially when we know AI image generation produces all sorts of crazy random stuff.

Also, judging AI image generation by its "historical accuracy" is just... well I hope you realize that is not what it was designed for at all.

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It was designed to generate images representative of the racial mix present in the United States. It has the guilt of white Americans embedded into it permanently with what amounts to clicker training.

The AIs are capable of accurately following instructions with historical accuracy.

This is overwritten by AI puritans to ensure that the AIs don’t misrepresent… them. And only them.

Seriously, if you’re a Japanese business person in Japan and you want a cool Samurai artwork for a presentation, all current AI image generators from large corporations will override the prompt and inject an African-Japanese black samurai to represent that group of people so downtrodden historically that they never existed.

> So did you run this 20 or 50 times and can you give us the statistical distribution of the races?

I would think the statistics should be the same as getting a white man portrayed in an image "An African Oba addressing a group of people at a festival".

I tried:

For the roman emperor prompt, Bard produced:

17 white men

2 white women

1 black man

1 black woman

For your prompt, Bard produced:

21 black men*

Interestingly, for the Roman Emperor prompt, Bard never refused to produce an image, though once instead of an image it only produced alt-text for two images, and once it only produced a single image, while for the African Oba prompt, three times it insisted it could not produce an image of that, once it explained that it is incapable of producing images, and once it produced only a single image rather than a pair.

*After typing most of this reply, I went to run more to see if it would ever behave differently, and on the 22nd image it produced an image of a black woman.

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