Sergey Brin says in rare appearance that company 'messed up' Gemini image launch
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Epstein%20Tes...
LLMs are like employees of the company except if the employee says/does something stupid that causes bad PR, you fire them. If the LLM causes something stupid, you are stuck with it and your company appears inept at it.
Which advertisers find the existence of white people undesirable? Its clearly a marginal group of people broadcasting their marginal values.
If it was fed data from pre Musk twitter, lawd there is going to be some bad training data.
Think of that what you will, but it does signal they see the problem and understand it's costing them money until they fix it.
It's so well understood that a white guy can't be the protagonist or audience surrogate in an ad that even mainstream SNL and Family Guy make throwaway jokes about it.
Is there a white judge or doctor in an ad after the year 2000? Or even a non-incompetent white dad? Nobody ever got fired for making the protagonist not-a-white-man.
Can you imagine a Canadian government PSA poster at a bus stop where the doctor on the poster is a white man?
Largely, I don't mind this. Up until the 70s/80s, the reverse was true. Now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Eventually it'll balance somewhere towards the center, where people of any color, gender or sexual orientation are allowed to be the bumbling fool in an ad.
> If nothing else, bear in mind that an image generator that has its thumb so heavily on the scale is less useful for users of all races. (A Black kid who wants an image of a typical Scandinavian Viking for a history paper is not helped here.) ... But… what racism does it actually fight? Which Black person’s life is improved by pretending that there were Black Vikings? And this points to far broader and more important questions. We live in a world where fighting racism has gone from fighting for an economy where all Black families can put food on the table to white people acknowledging the land rights of dead Native Americans before they give conference panels about how to maximize synergy in corporate workflow. In a world of affinity groups, diversity pledges, and an obsession with language that tests the boundaries of the possible, we have to ask ourselves hard questions about what any of it actually accomplishes. Who is all of this shit for?
Put it this way: the mindset of a company like google in their approach to moderation is to automate as much of it as possible. They hate using human labor to do manual daily tasks.
So they don't want to test and rate the quality output of Gemini over time.
You don't get a system that will happily output text summaries of the achievements of any ethnic group except Caucasians without political beliefs being a factor.
Either allow the query for all ethnicities, or none. Don't give a straight answer unless the query is for Caucasians, whereupon you lecture the user on how wrong they are for even asking that question.
They are only able to focus and organize around one thing: protecting the cash cow. So with Google that's the search advertising business and as a calcifying monopoly they will struggle to do anything else. They know that AI's potentially a threat but in an abstract, marketing-mutating sort of way their ad sales juggernaut can't understand. So they will throw a lot of money at AI, execs will make announcements stuffed with words like Bold and Transformation, and then they'll get sub-par results. This time around they ended up chasing random internal DEI goals or something instead of building a good product, and who knows what flub it will be next time.
The direct comparison is Microsoft's inability to win at mobile, no matter how much cash they burned. Similarly mobile was kind of this existential threat at the perimeter of the cash cow, which was enterprise Windows. So they threw gobs of money at it, but because they had become dysfunctional outside of directly preserving the cash cow, they couldn't make stuff stick. Your Pocket PC (literally they called it a PC!) is a clunker but hey it can connect to an Exchange server! Now let's buy Nokia and run it into the ground!
Google is now in it's own "Steve Balmer Era", where Windows and Office were the major cash cows and the company was throwing money without focus on projects failing left and right not caring since the main products were bringing in all the guacamole.
Correct. The worst part is Google (and others) know it and will do everything they can to make sure that their reality distortion spells is still conditioning you.
Once the issues are so widespread in the public such as Gemini's image generator the spell breaks and there is little room for them to spin it.
We're now seeing what happens when reality kicks in and all the perks and goodies are taken away when it is wartime - exposing lots of slackers and coasters at Google.
Is it because they assume Japanese people would find that offensive or what?
Personally I find the overuse of the word "Ninja" in tech cringe, same as the use of the word "Rockstar". But just because something is cringe, doesn't mean it's offensive.
This is an important distinction because people who think they know better can often be brought around while those who thing they are better are much harder to convince of the error of their ways because those who do not agree are - according to their own doctrine - morally inferior and as such can be ignored or shouted down. You can gather 40 people who think they know better in a college hall and show them why they are wrong. The quicker ones to take up the facts will help pull the slower ones over the line and by the time the session is over many if not most will be convinced of the error of their ways. Try the same with a group of 40 people who are convinced they are morally superior and the result tends to be very different with the group closing up against the heresy from those deplorables. If someone in the group tries to 'defect' he'd not only have to confront his own doubts but he'd be castigated by his own group.
I just tried "generate an image of a man camping in the woods" and it came back with "Sure, here is an image of a man camping in the woods" followed by a 10-15 second pause followed by "We are working to improve Gemini’s ability to generate images of people. We expect this feature to return soon and will notify you in release updates when it does." This would seem to indicate they're letting it generate an image and then running some sort of human detector on the output instead of filtering the prompt on the front end.
One wonders why they haven't done this kind of testing before going public with such an important feature of such an important new flagship product. It's not like the prompts were some super niche stuff that required a lot of imagination to conjure.
And they could have blocked the people image generation feature from the start if they saw it malfunctioning like that in tests and didn't have enough time to fix it on such a short notice before launch.
I find it hard to believe nobody internal at Google bothered to play with Gemini to generate people for shits and giggles and saw the hilarious wrong outputs and raise the alarm.
Or they did ran tests, saw the issues but they decided internally that there's nothing wrong with those generated outputs, which is even worse.
Either way, whichever reason it was, why would you use or even want to pay for a Google product if this is the level of QC and broken functionality you can expect from Google products?
To further my point. I use ChatGPT to translate stuff from English to German a lot and now I used it to write a legal complaint in German and I tried getting Gemini to translate it as well to compare it to ChatGPT, and instead of doing that, it just said it won't do it because it can't offer legal advice. FFS, I didn't ask you for legal advice, I already did my research on that topic, I just asked you to translate verbatim from English to German.
Gemini's "safety" guardrails make it beyond useless at this point that I wouldn't even use it even for free. How does Google plant to make money from it? Or is it gonna be another side-project they'll cancel in 2-5 years.
The alarm was drowned out by the "Shit OpenAI is miles ahead in this game, we need to launch ASAP to try to close the gap" alarm.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/4/24090879/some-details-on-g...
This suggests a jailbreak, if you can fool the "dumb" person detector (likely shallow vs deep learning) with your deep learning generator, the images pass through. I had some success last week with "upside down" or "standing on their head" though it may have been patched. You could consider occlusion "wearing a mask" etc. Basically find phrasing that would fool a naive person/face detector in the corresponding image.
As for the model, I truly believe it to be paradoxically pro-white racist. Imagine any stereotype for any race. You say "generate <stereotype> of a <historically white character/role>" and the model swaps out the white race for the stereotyped race, seemingly embracing racist stereotypes. On the other hand, for white stereotypes, they are much harder to produce since the model is hesitant to render white folks.
The problem is not image generation, is the entire thing.
> "it leans left in many cases"It is aggressive against the user.
The “insert an ethnic minority into every group photo” was the straw that broke the camels back as it was clearly biased.( for anyone who cares I am an ethnic minority).
But I do remember, and I mean this, my first ever query asking it to draw a picture by a Japanese artist resulted in a “call this number for mental health problems”
I was like wtf. The prompt was benign “water color sunbathing beach sunset” by some random normal Japanese artist. Sure potentially nsfw but the reply was completely hamfisted, insulting and really crazy.
I probably wouldn’t have cared but it was literally my first prompt.
Before anyone says “well it could have been degenerate” you have heard of the Michelangelo David right? The greatest ever sculpture? I haven’t tried but I’m pretty sure there isn’t a hope in hell the llm would reproduce anything like it.
Really went off it since day one.
FWIW GPT-4 via API has treated me well, more consistently than ChatGPT.
Would be nice if they solved the issues with Assistants but that’s another matter…
And it's rediscovering that we suck at prompting even humans, much less systems that have no idea what they're doing and just statistically stitch and glue data together.
These LLMs are just exposing that humans are fairly bad at communication and they are encoding that into automated systems.
The classic (2015-ish discovery) - "american inventors" google image search still appears to silently replace "american" with "african american"
The main serp page appears to have stopped doing it.
The question is any of the other search engines any better ?
DDG is fine I suppose, although my most frequent use case of looking up (nearly wrote “googling”) code solutions is mostly handled by ChatGPT these days.
I have no affiliation with them and dislike their cryptocurrency based snake oil. But as far as a search engine that hasn't been tinkered with and is free, not bad, and I recommend them on that basis alone.
The problem is not Gemini, it's Google.
Though this raises a question for me. If searching "American inventors" threw down pages and pages of white people, would the Internet raise a stink about it?
If it's anything like what happened to the female human computers that made the ENIAC and UNIVAC work, my bet is no. [0]
[0]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-women-behind-eniac? I only mentioned it because I read about it yesterday!
This tells me he doesn’t get it, or at least wont say it publicly. It’s a cultural problem. It clearly was trained or aligned with some massive biases.
When you tell an LLM to simply include diverse people, it will do that, emphasis on the "diverse" part.
The problem is systemic and it starts at the very beginning when they vet the people they hire. If you didn't go to particular American, European or Asian universities or have a non-super talent career path you're not going to get in.
Which is exactly what happens to people from disadvantaged backgrounds or countries.
You cannot preach diversity and at the same time not even represent the diversity that exists among white people from the United States alone at the same time.
Sounds like the same effect they've had on society ;D
Curious, who do you recommend using instead (for search, email, AI, etc)?
Really? I suspect the people who wanted it to be like that successfully tested that it was like that.
Evidently (i.e. evidenced by what we got) Google’s testers tested only what they wanted to test.
This is the equivalent of a someone who was a US president 40 years ago criticizing a current president.
Together with Larry they have the majority voting control over Alphabet.