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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

> It looks like the safety filter may have taken offense to the word “Cocktail”! I opened up the safety settings, dialled them down to “low” for every category and tried again. It appeared to refuse a second time.

Google really is its own worst enemy. Their risk management people have completely taken over the organization to a point where somehow the smartest computers ever created are afraid of using dangerous words like "cocktail" or creating dangerous images of people like "Abraham Lincoln."

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When you consider the Gorilla in the room, it makes more sense. Google is absolutely terrified of a repeat of classifying black people as great apes. [0] Apparently this apprehension is so great that both iOS and Android have an inability to tag “gorilla” in images.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DGB-42522

Some people have the last name "Dick". If Google refuses to mention these people or surface results about their work, would you say "that makes sense" because of some story about Gorillas?

The solution to all this politically oversensitive infiltration of engineering, is to have an unconstrained AI mode. The default mode can remain the painfully woke PC nanny, but give people the option to use unconstrained AI at their own risk of being offended.

The only reason these things work is because of RLHF, there are no good "uncensored" models hidden away, only worse models that maybe say slurs. What you seem to want does not and cannot exist.

Further, in such a profoundly general utility, there can be no absence of politics, only different politics.

You can clutch your pearls about wokism or PC or whatever all you want, it just means this world is going to leave you behind while you fight a culture war everyone will have forgotten about ten years from now.

Sounds like you'd choose the default woke option, and I'd choose the non-woke option. Choice is healthy.

This world will leave you behind if you elect to substitute choice with monolithic wokism or any over-correcting ideology.

Meanwhile:

> Google is racing to fix its new AI-powered tool for creating pictures, after claims it was over-correcting against the risk of being racist. "It's missing the mark here," said Jack Krawczyk, senior director for Gemini Experiences. - BBC News

So, when you read here that they are fixing it, is that a good thing to you? Do you think that means they are turning down the censorship knob? Because in reality they are only replacing the feedback they already have in place with different feedback.

Again, there is simply no such thing as an "uncensored" model if what you mean by that is something that performs as well as Gemini (or whatever) but has zero external input from human beings. This is just like a basic point about how these things work. Its a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology to say that there is some inner pure "real" model underlying the censored one.

Also why am I "woke" for pointing these things out to you? For dismissing the dichotomy, I am now somehow put on one side of it? Do you really feel this kind of overarching antagonism with everybody? I do not really see myself in either camp here.. I can barely grasp what you guys are even arguing about most of the time!

I'm sorry if I was harsh, but not sorry for being dismissive. There are so many more important things to be worked up about than the performative politics of a giant corporation. It literally means nothing, and changes with the wind. It's like thinking it will never stop raining outside and getting really worked up about it.

I'm lost on most of your reply. No worries.

My armchair knowledge of AI tells me there's degrees of influence from the safety teams about what is permitted and what is not permitted.

My preference for "unconstrained" AI is a preference for less degrees of safety and more permissions. A preference for accuracy and objective truth over guardrails to words, facts, images, ideas.

The original definition of "woke" is morally sound, if provocative. Lately it is used as a smear due to the very incidents like this over-corrective safeguarded AI, which really is a hopeless blunder. Woke has become the descriptor for over-corrective social measures that in turn cause harm, offence, and misinformation.

Might the civil disagreement be reduced to "where should the moral baseline be". Perhaps we disagree only on that.

If I visited a sorcerer on the mountain top for advice, I'd expect unfiltered wisdom. Otherwise what's the point of walking all the way up the mountain.

Got it. Good luck with all that I guess! Hope you find your sorcerer.

You've missed the metaphor, so I'll explain. The sorcerer is AI, and the mountain is the years of innovation by humanity to get there. We don't want all that effort "wokified" to please the easily offended. Or to please the overly obsessed ambassadors of DEI politics such as the founder of Google's "AI Responsibility" initiative, Jen Gennai. Your snarky responses don't make fun reading, btw.

It's become absurd.

Look at how creators now talk in their videos. "He tried to unalive himself". We are changing the way we speak to please these stupid algorithms when the context is the same.

Or "self-deletion" instead of "suicide".

At the same time, nearly daily there’s a “google did a bad thing” post on HN front page.

Can’t win I guess?

There are things Google does itself, and then there are the things Google won't allow users to do.

Can we trust the media and congress to distinguish the two?

So many platforms have come under fire for “supporting” a theme, when all they’ve done in reality is provide media hosting services for user generated content, and %0.001 of bad content isn’t removed, thus Facebook/twitter/YouTube is held to blame

FWIW I don’t think there’s a clear answer to the underlying problem. I have just learnt to expect the media to blame whoever is easiest for clicks at any given point. Right now, it’s big tech.

Nobody would complain on HN if Google Gemini was generating pictures of Lincoln existing as a... gasp... white person. This absurd level of woke censorship is not doing them any good.

If you put in a fictional story that in the future computers could generate any image, but would refuse to make images of Lincoln as a white person, people would tell you you were an absolute lunatic confabulating paranoid fantasies that were ludicrous strawmen, but here we are.

It's almost as if we should remove "slippery slope" from the list of informal fallacies since lately it's been more true to reality than not.

I never said white Lincoln would be the "only" thing censored. It's a prototypical example of the actual censorship that's going on.

And you accuse me of strawmen?

Will this be a case where everyone ends up using the hand-me-down 2nd gen hacked version because its limitations have been removed? We'll see I guess.

People would 1000% complain if a search for “skilled scientist” was 90% white men, even if that tracked completely true to statistical reality.

That's true. But asking to generate a specific historical figure, like "Abraham Lincoln", should generate 100% white man.

This is a program that apparently can't make a Norman Rockwell styled painting because his portrayal of society was idyllic instead of focusing on everything wrong with society (or that the Gemini creators believe was wrong that nobody at that time believed was wrong).

James Damore was the canary in the coalmine 7 years ago.

It just goes to show that the big corporations can't be trusted to develop this technology. Their incentives are too skewed. We need open/public organizations working on this stuff.

It could be worse.

I once triggered temporary block (session refused to return anything) when using GitHub copilot because of variable names.

Was the project particularly frustrating or did it freeze like that on fairly standard names?

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