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Comment by throw310822 | Hacker News Reader

Asked to generate any image of people (British kings, American colonists, German WW2 soldiers (!), the founders of Google (!!), Roman centurions, Vikings, historical Popes, you name it) it would invariably generate them as women and/ or non-whites. Asked specifically to generate images of people of various ethnic groups, it would happily do it except in the case of white people, in which it would flatly refuse.

The whole debacle is so comical that it makes me think someone might have actually allowed it just to torpedo the DEI or ethical teams in charge of this at Google.

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Oh and nobody cares that it did that. Google only took action once people started making images of black nazis.

This does feel too amazing not to be a purposeful middle finger to DEI efforts.

What's weird is that this is produced by the same Google that runs Youtube, which invariably wants to serve me more and more rightwing flavored content. Possibly the recommendation engine gets thrown off by the user base who spends hours and hours a day on Youtube vs the general population?

I've noticed this too, which I'd previously chalked up to "I guess left-wing commentators/vloggers/whatever have left for other platforms"

For a week or two, I was presented with tons of Jordan Peterson talks, which I've never clicked on because of my tendency to consciously ignore <pseudo-celebrity everyone is raving/ranting about>.

After clicking on everything except Peterson-adjacent videos, my feed is now filled with "Bill Maher owns the libs!" shorts. I don't get it.

I've used it logged in, logged out.

I've clicked to "stop showing me this channel" / "im not interested in" etc..

And without fail, it starts showing Maher/Rogan/Peterson/blah blah blah stuff. Which is fine if that's what I wanted, but I'm watching like.. SNL clips, some comedians and movie trailers. And have proactively expressed I don't want to see Rogan/Peterson repeatedly.

There's also shows I cannot get it to stop showing me clips of - Sunny, Sopranos, etc.

Yeah, I've given up experimenting, but it is exactly that set of Maher/Rogan/Peterson, three names I've actively avoided for quite a while.

I probably wouldn't have remembered it if it weren't a continual anti-recommendation of what are (in my mind) somewhat niche speakers. It's also surprising given at least Rogan and Peterson's troubles with advertisers.

It's not like it's <latest movie trailer> or <breaking news story> or something else of a general appeal. Maybe YT is trying to demonstrate they're not censoring or something?

I do watch SNL and some CC stuff occasionally, but I mostly search for STEM and history lectures/documentaries, or "10 hrs of nondescript background music".

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