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Comment by Iulioh | Hacker News Reader

I'm out of the loop, what are the examples of this bias?

Here you go https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/23/google-gemini-ai...

Apparently the new model when asked for historical figures that were historically white would "hallucinate" more diverse persons. And the article's author is claiming that the training had these biases from the jump.

Re: the Twitter post it reads like a "I'm leaving social media' post and then the author waits to see all the engagement -- all the "no don't leave, we love you!" nonesense. Or maybe it's the radicalization origin of a tech person: oh they trained the data to be woke from the beginning, rawr I'm gonna crusade against this! sort of thinking.

It's an AI model who cares? It's not like anyone is getting their facts from it and if they are they need to be shown the folly of that. They're tools. I find them best at reasoning somewhat well about code and that's about it.

> It's an AI model who cares? It's not like anyone is getting their facts from it

People at large are definitely getting their facts from it. Just like a non-negligible number of people consume fake news as facts.

So is it tech's problem that people are lazy, stupid, or both?

I mean am I just an out of touch old man (I'm only 37) who still goes to reputable news sources for my news and then tries to corroborate things that sound outlandish with other research when the headline or claim is ridiculous?

> Apparently the new model when asked for historical figures that were historically white would "hallucinate" more diverse persons.

This is a weird parallel to similar controversies in fiction.

So presumably an AI image generator generating images of historical figures in situations they never experienced, wearing clothes they never wore, in places they never visited, at times they didn't live through, using tools they never heard of, meeting people who's lives didn't overlap, saying things they never said in languages they never spoke etc. is fine but skin colour is a bridge too far because "historical realism" is soooooo important when using an AI image generator.

I think the problem people have is that all those other hallucinations were happenstance mistakes, while skin color was added intentionally as a bias through the development of the model. The AI was specifically told "ignore facts, improve diversity", meaning someone deliberately decided diversity was more important than facts. That someone (or multiple someone) has authority at one of the largest companies on earth. This shows the company is willing to add bias for whatever reason.

These are the companies we expect will drive AI development to the point where it will replace a lot of the jobs humans do. Are we OK allowing them to purposefully retell history to hide ugly or inconvenient truths? There are already lots of people believing slaves were "expensive" or treated well, that it might have been a great honor to "work" for their great great grandfathers. Where did they get that idea I wonder?

Gemini tends to generate images of non-white people which made some white people very mad.

Take off the spin. When asked to generate nazi soldiers, it generated black, asian, and native american people wearing nazi uniforms.

When asked to generate white people, it said it's not allowed to.

It's a creative toy, not a history book.

Please. It flat out refused to generate pictures of white people because Google thought that wouldn't be diverse enough. It's an ideological tool, not a creative toy.

That is a gross misrepresentation of what is happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39509311

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