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Comment by kweingar | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been saying this since DALL-E was released three years ago: image generation is going to be a can of worms, forever.

Google was clumsy here (in the same way that OpenAI was with DALL-E) but no amount of patches are going to fix the culture wars. Taking a text prompt and turning it into a picture is always going to be contentious. There will always be some amount of real bias and some amount of perceived bias on top of that.

And it’s incredibly cheap and easy for users to find real or perceived bias if they’re looking for it.

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Even just the race of the default "person" is impossible to set in an absolute manner. It feels like one could tackle this by having a checkbox of various filters that add specific biases. Like what race do you want your default person to be?

They could even put the forced-diversity-overdrive filter as the default, and for "real mode" display a disclaimer about it having biases that are reflections of all the garbage human biases that have been fed into these systems. Then when the political hacks of either team post pictures that are just obvious results of the filter they selected, they can be ignored.

I suspect the stopper is that these machine learning systems are being marketed as superintelligent "AI" which can solve all of the world's problems, and having to baby them with settings would be a recognition that they're actually just imperfect tools.

Yeah they're trying to walk a tightrope between groups who want the AI to be less racist and more racist, and neither side will ever be happy.

There is a third group who just want it to not suck. Imo that's been the largest group I've seen discussing the issues.

What? If I ask for a picture of a white family and get back a racially diverse family, how am I racist for being upset about the result? It didn’t do what I asked and it wasn’t an outrageous ask.

Why, exactly, are you asking an AI for pictures of a white family? Seems extremely strange.

Could be a staff writer for NME looking for quirky images to go up alongside a review of Whitest Boy On The Beach by Fat White Family.

The possibilities are many.

Not familiar with what NME means but perhaps they could check literally any stock photo site instead of the only busted AI that doesn't show this one particular thing?

British version of Rolling Stone that's fifteen years older.

    New Musical Express (NME) is a British music, film, gaming, and culture website and brand. Founded as a newspaper in 1952, with the publication being referred to as a 'rock inkie'.

> but perhaps they could check ..

Right now, maybe, although they have staff photographers to shoot content by description - in the near future they and other magazines would want good AI image generation sites that can generate side content for pale white scottish bands and for Little Simz returning to roots in Nigeria: https://youtu.be/tvY31eN3gtE?t=61

Would it be equally extremely strange to ask an AI for pictures of a black or asian family? You may be telling on yourself here.

If someone is asking an AI for pictures specifically of a black or asian family I would assume they are corporate HR. If someone's asking an AI for pictures specifically of a white family I would assume their comment history includes rants about the great replacement theory.

My wife is the daughter of Filipino immigrants, so obviously my kids are mixed race and we don't fit the profile of a "white" family, but my take from your comment is that you spend way too much time thinking about tribal identity politics.

If I'm writing a short story (let's say it's fan fiction for "Little Women") about a family in a New England village in the 1860s, images that include non-white people in them are going to look absurd and be ahistorical. Your assumption that the only reason to prompt for an image of an ethnically homogenous family is due to bigotry appears to reflect a negative and pessimistic view of humans. I would guess this view stems from spending too much time reading Twitter comments and forgetting that they are written by a tiny, non-represenative sample of the population that skews towards derangment.

Congrats on being married, but I'm not sure what your family's ethnic identity has to do with your really cool short story and accompanying AI generated picture idea. It's the perfect example really, I can't believe I ever thought it was weird to type "picture of white family" into a generative AI.

I get that people will be really sad that they don't get to look at your AI generated 1860s white family because Google has made it illegal for all AIs to create images of white people. However I'll do you a solid: I happen to know a couple white families and I'll get them to pose for your short story. Just PM me the description and I'll hook you up.

Please stop. You're commenting in bad faith, not adding anything to the discussion, and are not really engaging with other commenters based on the substance of their comments.

You're racist then. Openly too. Don't you realize this is blackface?

Sometimes people want photos of families that look like their current reality.

I wouldn't want someone from a visibly different ethnicity when I'm looking for something like this.

Even black communities around me have visibly discernable differences. Where I live driving an hour might be enough. We aren't a monolith anywhere

When you take photos of your family do you rent others of a different ethnicity to avoid looking racist?

Well, at least you admit your racism openly I guess.

There are artistic reasons why you would want to indicate white as the skin color. For example maybe you want a snow woman that fades into the snow.

You may have replied to the wrong comment because I think we're here talking about how this dude can't figure out how to find a picture of a white family on the internet.

He could want the family in specific poses or wearing certain types of clothing, or any other forms of image details.

Which... Is the whole point of using AI. To be able to generate lots of different pictures based on your prompt.

That's perfectly reasonable.

Or maybe they just wanted a picture that looks like themself to post as a profile picture, for example.

Id hope that you don't support people posting profile pictures of themselves in blackface.

And in order to not do that, the AI needs to follow the prompt of the user.

No, it's not extremely strange.

Sorry to offend you!

Thanks for apologizing. Unfortunately such a dumb, contrived complaint has caused me permanent damage from which I may never recover.

You realize this statement is racist?

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