Hacker News Reader

Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

It does seem really strange that the tool refuses specific backgrounds. So if I am trying to make a city scene in Singapore and want all Asians in the background, the tool refuses? On what grounds?

This seems pretty non-functional and while I applaud, I guess, the idea that somehow this is more fair it seems like the legitimate uses for needing specific demographic backgrounds in an image outweigh racists trying to make an uberimage or whatever 1billion:1.

Fortunately, there are competing tools that aren’t poorly built.

View on HN

Can anyone explain in simple terms what the actual harm would be of allowing everyone to generate images with whatever racial composition they desired? If you can specify the skin colour one way you can do it the other ways as well and instead of everyone being upset at having this forced down our throats we’d probably all be liking pictures of interesting concepts like what if Native Americans were the first to land on the moon or what if America was colonized by African nations and all the founding fathers were black. No one opposes these concepts, people just hate having it arbitrarily forced on them.

> This seems pretty non-functional and while I applaud, I guess, the idea that somehow this is more fair

Fair to whom?

> racists trying to make an uberimage

It's a catastrophically flawed assumption that racism only happens in one direction.

> if I am trying to make a city scene in Singapore

<chuckle> I'm on a flight to Singapore right now, I'll report back :)

> :)

An entrepot of the British Empire with as much diversity as New York City if not more.

> with as much diversity as New York City if not more

I'm not sure Singapore is anywhere near as diverse as NYC:

NYC (2020): 30.9% White (non-Hispanic) 28.7% Hispanic or Latino 20.2% Black or African American (non-Hispanic) 15.6% Asian 0.2% Native American (non-Hispanic)

Singapore: 75.9% Chinese 15.1% Malay 7.4% Indian

It isn't "fair" when it is a misrepresentation of what the user asks for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com