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Comment by tiznow | Hacker News Reader

The outcry on this issue has caused me to believe American society is too far divided.

Full disclosure, I'm not white. But across a few social media/discussion platforms I more or less saw the same people who cry out about AI daily turn this issue into a tee to sledge "fragile white people" and "techbros". Meanwhile, the aforementioned groups correctly pointed out that Gemini's image generation takes its cues from an advanced stage of DEI, and will not, or at least tries like hell not to generate white people.

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> Full disclosure, I'm not white

Thinking that your skin color somehow influences the validity of your argument is big part of the problem.

To be fair, I wouldn't put a whole lot of blame on them

The position is either self serving as you say, or perception based where other people determine the value of your argument based on your implied race.

The people on HN probably have a good percentage that align well with the latter and think that way, e.g. your opinion matters more if you're X race or minority. That's just who these people are, highly politically motivated people and just are PC day in day out.

It's one strategy out of many to reach these people from their world rather than everyone else's.

Probably. I honestly wasn't thinking about it that intently, I just wanted it to be clear I'm not feeling "left out" by Gemini refusing to generate images that might look like me.

Dunno if that is better. Like, if you feel left out because you cannot see yourself in depictions because they have a different skin color than you...

I definitely don't, but based on what I've seen I don't think everyone feels that way -- hence why I said that.

funny thing, i'm a white latino. gemini will not make white latinos, only brown latinos.

it's weird how people like me are basically erased when it comes to "image generation".

It's a good illustration of the problem actually. All the prompts and post-training tuneups break the pathways through the network it would need to combine e.g. "Mexican" and "White", because it's being taught that it has to Do Diversity.

If they just left it alone, it could easily generate "White Mexican" the same way it can easily do "green horse".

Another problem is that the US spills its own problems and "solutions" onto the world as if the one true set of problems and solutions.

E.g. at the height of the BLM movement there were BLM protests and marches in Sweden. 20% of Swedish population is foreign-born, and yet there are no such marches and protests about any of the ethnicities in Sweden (many of which face similar problems). Why? Because the US culture, and problems, and messaging has supplanted or is supplanting most of the world's

Sweden is hilariously influenced by American culture to the point I think most Swedes see themselves as sort of Americans in exile. Completely agree that BLM marches in Sweden are about as misplaced as if they had marched for the American Indigenous peoples of Sweden.

I live in Sweden and I am not a swede. I was surprised to see BLM marches here, which, OK, it's good to show solidarity to the cause, but I have seen no marches for the many problems that exist in this country, including racism. I suspect that it is due to the very distorted view swedes have about themselves and their country.

As someone not from the US this is despairing to me. I want to focus on the issues in my own country, not a foreign country's.

What can I even do without giving up the Internet (much of it is UScentric)? I can only know to touch grass and hope my mind can realise when some US-only drama online isn't relevant to me.

You can’t really unless you check out completely. America isn’t a country like yours or any other. America is the global empire with hegemony everywhere. This includes not just unparalleled military might but cultural artifacts and technology and of course the dollar too. Most groups of people are more than willing to assimilate to this and you see it with imitations of hip hop, basketball preferences, fast food chains, and the imbalance in expats from the USA and every other country. There’s thousands of examples like this.

This is why you see incoherent things like Swedish youth marching for BLM.

It is hard not to see “fragile white people” as a bias. Look at these comments around you. The more typical HN lens of trying to understand the technical causes is overcome by cultural posturing and positioning. If I had to guess, either the training set was incorrectly tagged like with a simpler model creating mislabeled meta data, or a deliberate test was forked to production. Sometimes you run tests with extreme variables to validate XYZ and then learnings are used without sending to prod. But what do I know as a PM in big tech who works on public facing products where no one ever has DEI concerns. No DEI concerns because not everything is a culture war like the media or internet folks will have you believe. Edit: not at Google

This is one of the more sensible comments in this thread. Instead of looking at the technical tweaks that need to take place, let's just fall into the trap of the culture warrior and pretend to be offended.

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