Comment by foldr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by foldr | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a very concerted effort to hang far more weight on this story than it can reasonably bear. Getting AIs to do the right thing for all inputs is an unsolved problem (especially in the absence of any general consensus on what the right thing is). Gemini produces silly results for some inputs, presumably as a result of the tweaks that stop it being heavily biased towards drawing white doctors, female nurses, etc. etc. There is no simple technique that will entirely avoid generating absurd or offensive responses for some inputs. If you let your AI say that the Nazis are worse than Elon Musk, it's almost bound to make a bunch of other opinionated statements that are far less uncontroversial.

Clearly Gemini has a lot of room for improvement. It's perfectly fair to criticize Google for its shortcomings. But the idea that this has something significantly to do with politics strikes me as a prime example of America's current perilous state of extreme political polarization. Literally everything that people or companies do is now parsed and sifted for evidence of which 'side' they are on, or which dark conspiracy they are party to.

its hard to believe that this is just a simple accident because it's a difficult problem, considering past tweets from people involved. also it was released without any testing? how did this past that phase? there's definitely something more wrong here than "just a difficult technical problem"

Is it really that hard to believe? I continue to be amazed that any of these systems work at all. People sure stopped being impressed by AI pretty quick. Now we apparently think that LLMs are perfect and there must be a wicked human to blame every time an LLM produces a weird output.

If the author of a system writes in every blog post that they tested their system to remove/manipulate things and the skewing of the results fit extremely will with what they - in their own words - deemed as things to remove then .. yeah: It's probably a (wicked) human to blame.

If there's evidence of malicious intent behind this then just link to it.

> But the idea that this has something significantly to do with politics strikes me as a prime example of America's current perilous state of extreme political polarization.

Just about everything in business has to do with politics. It might be more apparent today because the pretense that business != politics has been dropped. But businesses have always taken a strong interest in shaping public policy, just look at the number of business executives have also served as Presidents/Congressman/Cabinet members.

And not just because it's good business to shape public policy. These people also take an active interest in shaping the moral fabric of America by enforcing their values through government influence..

The bias in the model took years to craft. Probably hundreds of engineers over many years built the system that crafted the data sets required to do censorship.

Clearly Google don't want Gemini to draw black Vikings. That's just a mistake. I don't know enough about tweaking AIs to say whether it's a dumb mistake or the sort of mistake that's very difficult to avoid without making other, equally serious mistakes. But it's definitely not a political conspiracy.

One of the largest, most bureaucratic, but also most sophisticated companies, did not catch that? Ofcourse they did. The level of approvals to release this model must have been insane.

a large org like this would have spent years of man-hours spent in requirements, functional and NFR, then regression testing and acceptance testing, multiple levels of sign-off required, change request approvals, etc.

And yet lots of Google products get released with bugs. Buggy software is the default. Elaborate explanations are not required.

In concrete terms, what exactly could Google have hoped to gain from releasing an image generator that defaults to black Vikings? If it wasn't a mistake, what is the grand plan that it contributes to? And why has Google immediately about-faced and abandoned this plan? Did they think everyone would love the black Vikings?

In any case, the entire premise of this confected outrage (that AIs should be expected to produce historically accurate images for arbitrary inputs) is completely daft.

Almost certainly this is some prompt post processing, where the prompt is appended with “Make the image diverse in race and gender”. This is a trivial fix and not baked into the weights. However removing this would almost certainly surface the actual overrepresentation of “men as lawyers, women as nurses” etc. in the training data and thus the weights. Google tried a simple hack to remove this bias via prompt engineering. It’s stupid but overplayed

I'm honestly kind of dumbfounded by the level of hyperbolic reaction to what is... basically just a gaffe? AI models have all been doing this sort of thing from the start, because they don't want to get the pants sued off them. This is perhaps different in degree from ChatGPT's guardrails, and obviously more visual for splashier tweets, but I don't see how it's different in its general nature.

Couldn’t agree more. It’s a hard, maybe impossible, problem to solve. You can’t make everyone happy and this is seemingly the result.

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