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?
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.
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.
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.
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Epstein%20Tes...