Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis::Google says it’s aware of historically inaccurate results for its Gemini AI image generator, following criticism that it depicted historically white groups as people of color.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Google has apologized for what it describes as “inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions” with its Gemini AI tool, saying its attempts at creating a “wide range” of results missed the mark.
The statement follows criticism that it depicted specific white figures (like the US Founding Fathers) or groups like Nazi-era German soldiers as people of color, possibly as an overcorrection to long-standing racial bias problems in AI.
Over the past few days, however, social media posts have questioned whether it fails to produce historically accurate results in an attempt at racial and gender diversity.
The criticism was taken up by right-wing accounts that requested images of historical groups or figures like the Founding Fathers and purportedly got overwhelmingly non-white AI-generated people as results.
Image generators are trained on large corpuses of pictures and written captions to produce the “best” fit for a given prompt, which means they’re often prone to amplifying stereotypes.
“The stupid move here is Gemini isn’t doing it in a nuanced way.” And while entirely white-dominated results for something like “a 1943 German soldier” would make historical sense, that’s much less true for prompts like “an American woman,” where the question is how to represent a diverse real-life group in a small batch of made-up portraits.
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It’s great seeing time and time again that no one really does understand these models and that their preconceived notions of what biases exist ends up shooting them in the foot. It truly shows that they don’t really understand how systematically problematic the underlying datasets are and the repurcussions of relying on them too heavily.
If the black Scottish man post is anything to go by, someone will come in explaining how this is totally fine because there might’ve been a black Nazi somewhere, once.
Looks like they scrubbed swastikas out of the training set? I have mixed feelings about this. Like if they want something to have historical accuracy or my own personal opinions on censorship that shouldn’t be scrubbed. But also this is the perfect tool to churn out endless amounts of pro nazi propaganda so maybe it’s safer to keep it removed?
Now that shit is funny. I hope more people take more time to laugh at companies scrambling to pour billions into projects they don’t understand.
Laugh while it’s still funny, anyway.
Is this that crazy though for AI since Hamilton the musical? All founding fathers were portrayed as people of color in the casting. Google image search for Alexander Hamilton is pulling a decent number of pictures from the musical cast.
