A traditional outfit
How traditional? How statistically relevant is it? Most Indians i know do not wear turbans at all.
If these stats are trustworthy (and i think they are), the only Indians that wear turbans are Sikhs (1.7%) and Muslims (14.2%). I’d say 15.9% is not statistically significant.
I think you’re looking at it wrong. The prompt is to make an image of someone who is recognizable as Indian. The turban is indicative clothing of that heritage and therefore will cause the subject to be more recognizable as Indian to someone else. The current rate at which Indian people wear turbans isn’t necessarily the correct statistic to look at.
What do you picture when you think, a guy from Texas? Are they wearing a hat? What kind? What percentage of Texans actually wear that specific hat that you might be thinking of?
A surprising number of Texans wear cowboy and trucker hats (both stereotypical). A surprising number of Indians don’t wear turbans since it’s by far a minority.
I think the idea is that it’s what makes a person “an Indian” and not something else.
Only a minority of Indians wear turbans, but more Indians than other people wear turbans. So if someone’s wearing a turban, then that person is probably Indian.
I’m not saying that’s true necessarily (though it may be), but that’s how the AI interprets it…or how pictures get tagged.
It’s like with Canadians and maple leaves. Most Canadians aren’t wearing maple leaf stuff, but I wouldn’t be surprised if an AI added maple leaves to an image of “a Canadian”.
Imagine a German man from Bavaria… You just thought of a man wearing Lederhosen and holding a beer, didn’t you? Would you be surprised if I told you that they usually don’t look like that outside of a festival?
A traditional dress is not a religious dress,
Point taken.
On a footnote: why should the concept of a traditional dress be offensive?
Ain’t to me, couldn’t care less. I was just trying to point out that most Indians do not seem to wear turbans (and based my reasoning on the religions dress alone).
What’s the data that the model is being fed? What percentage of imaging featuring Indian men are tagged as such? What percentage of imaging featuring men wearing Turbans are tagged as Indian Men? Are there any images featuring Pakistan men wearing Turbans? Even if only a minority of Indian feature Turbans, if that’s the only distinction between Indian and Pakistan men in the model data, the model will favor Turbans for Indian Men. That’s just a hypothetical explanation.
You don’t think nearly 1/6th is statistically significant? What’s the lower bound on significance as you see things?
To be clear, it’s obviously dumb for their generative system to be overrepresenting turbans like this, although it’s likely to be a bias in the inputs rather than something the system came up with itself, I just think that 5% is generally enough to be considered significant and calling three times that not significant confuses me.
You don’t think nearly 1/6th is statistically significant?
For statistics’ sake? Yes.
For the LLM bias? No.
Put in western or Texas and that’s what you get, the west is a huge area even just of America but the word is linked to a lot of movie tropes and stuff so that’s what you get.
This is also only when the language is English, ask in urdu or Bengali and you get totally different results, in fact just use urdu instead of Indian and get less turbans or put in Punjabi and you’ll get more turbuns.
Or just put turban in the negatives if you want
Pre-independence, most Indian males had some sort of headgear. E.g. look at any old photos of Bombay
Why would you ask a bot to generate a stereotypical image and then be surprised it generates a stereotypical image. If you give it a simplistic prompt it will come up with a simplistic response.
So the LLM answers what’s relevant according to stereotypes instead of what’s relevant… in reality?
Kinda makes sense though. I’d expect images where it’s actually labelled as “an Indian person” to actually over represent people wearing this kind of clothing. An image of an Indian person doing something mundane in more generic clothing is probably more often than not going to be labelled as “a person doing X” rather than “An Indian person doing X”. Not sure why these authors are so surprised by this
Meanwhile on DALL-E…
I’m just surprised there’s no windmill in either of them. Canals, bikes, tulips… Check check check.
Careful, the next generated image is gonna contain a windmill with clogs for blades
That’s Sikh
