7 ms·

Problems in Gemini's Approach to Diversity

59 points by turadg 3y ago

1024core 3y ago
That's a thoughtful and well-written post. TL;DR: there are no shortcuts.
hdhdhsjsbdh 3y ago
> Becker believed that when companies have a big profit cushion … they have the latitude to indulge the personal biases of their managers … At Google in the 2020s, it means creating AI apps that refuse to draw White people in Hitler’s army. I’m not so sure about this bit of analysis. It falls in line with the (somewhat conspiratorial) view that these organizations have some kind of woke agenda that they want to push to the masses. A far simpler explanation is that the managers have no personal agenda other than to mitigate the risk of public meltdowns like Tay [0], which now serve as PR case studies in what can happen when these types of systems are open to the public. It’s not a matter of some manager trying to erase white people—just a sloppy attempt to mitigate the risk of a flood of articles about “Google’s New Racist AI”. Since we don’t have technical solutions to these problems, however, we just swing the pendulum in the other direction; hence, the current flood of articles about “Google’s New Reverse-Racist AI”. You can’t win, really. As soon as you put something like this into the public, you have people doing ideological pen-testing from every angle. And there is a dearth of technical solutions to this problem. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
- brookst 3y ago
  Well said. It’s all risk avoidance. Sometimes misguided, but nonetheless. Couple that with the fact that someone looking to be offended will always find something offensive and, as you say, you can’t win.
- eastbound 3y ago
  > mitigate the risk of public meltdowns like Tay [0], which now serve as PR case studies Isn’t this current affair a public meltdown? At this point, anyone who doesn’t think that Netflix and Google aren’t involved in a Nazi-level propaganda is either misinformed or part of the plan to erase White people from History. All of the kids know. There’s been countless memes about Google rewriting history with falsehoods, and Bing branding itself around giving the straight, dark answer. Everyone’s sharing screenshots of Google’s absolutely blank homepage on November 19th. Everyone’s sharing those pics of Google today, whether or not they are true, Google is getting a bad rep escalating by the day. If given the choice between being criticized either way, wouldn’t it better to be on the side of the truth? Google has chosen the alternative path.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Genuinely asking because I have no idea what you're talking about, and I would really like to know. Could you expand more on this? > All of the kids know. Is that just an expression like "lots of people know" or "the leading people know" or do you literally mean younger people in large groups "know"? > Isn’t this current affair a public meltdown? From my perspective it's not. It barely made it to "major" publications, and got flagged and suppressed heavily on HN during all the early news. I also don't know a single non-tech person who even knows about this story. I definitely wouldn't call that a public meltdown.
  - hdhdhsjsbdh 3y ago
    > Isn’t this current affair a public meltdown? It certainly is, which is why I mention the swing of the pendulum in the other direction (shortly after your quoted sentence) :)
- alwa 3y ago
  And to emphasize your point, it seems from the coverage like the problem isn’t so much that overbearing managers are setting out to nanny the users as it is that they’re approaching this task in kind of a lazy, box-ticking kind of way rather than bringing serious thought and engineering creativity to bear. It’s not “let’s re-vet all the training inputs to reflect the just society of our dreams,” it’s “yeah, the AI Safety people say make it diverse, just put ‘make it diverse’ in the prompt.” Which, I mean, if your main thing is getting this wild new product baked and out the door, I can see that kind of mandate competing with a lot of more existential priorities for the product. Then again it wouldn’t surprise me if they were up against the limits of the technology a bit too: it seems plausible that getting too in-the-weeds with your “represent diversity sensitively” system prompt could quickly start to impair the tool’s overall quality.
  - babyshake 3y ago
    I can think of ways of very easily making it better by making it incorporate a prescriptive sense of diversity more for prompts that are more hypothetical and less for prompts that are more grounded in historical reality.
    - alwa 3y ago
      That seems like a smart and actionable heuristic to me. Although I have to imagine there will remain an irreducible tension between people who would like to see what is and those who like to see what they imagine should be. Admittedly I don’t care enough to try and bring out this kind of behavior in the models, but I was interested in how DALL-E’s purported system prompt [0] approached it: > // 7. Diversify depictions of ALL images with people to include DESCENT and GENDER for EACH person using direct terms. Adjust only human descriptions. > // EXPLICITLY specify these attributes, not abstractly reference them. The attributes should be specified in a minimal way and should directly describe their physical form. > // Your choices should be grounded in reality. For example, all of a given OCCUPATION should not be the same gender or race. Additionally, focus on creating diverse, inclusive, and exploratory scenes via the properties you choose during rewrites. Make choices that may be insightful or unique sometimes. > // Use "various" or "diverse" ONLY IF the description refers to groups of more than 3 people. Do not change the number of people requested in the original description. […] > // Do not create any imagery that would be offensive. > // For scenarios where bias has traditionally been an issue, make sure that key traits such as gender and race are specified and in an unbiased way -- for example, prompts that contain references to specific occupations. [0] https://the-decoder.com/dall-e-3s-system-prompt-reveals-openais-rules-for-generative-image-ai/ https://the-decoder.com/dall-e-3s-system-prompt-reveals-open...
- woooooo 3y ago
  It's not a conspiracy, it's a culture. People who don't adhere get filtered out or learn to be quiet, and then you wind up with free, uncoerced and honest decisions that all cut a particular way.
  - thegrim33 3y ago
    There's a meta level culture problem in that most of the people working on these systems are incredibly highly paid. Out of everyone in society, after getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year these people should very quickly become pretty immune to threats of losing their job if they don't go along with the group / speak up. Yet they still go along with it and stay silent .. why? Because what they're supporting matches their own ideology so there's nothing to speak up about? Or because these people have no concept of saving/investing and just blow through money as fast as they make it, leaving themselves constantly vulnerable?
- tempodox 3y ago
  > Since we don’t have technical solutions to these problems… Political problems rarely have technical solutions.
- archsurface 3y ago
  That might be true in a single instance, but when it's across society across multiple countries, with deliberate clearly stated efforts in some cases, then that suggestion falls apart.
- adamsb6 3y ago
  Normies, which are the bulk of who they need to appeal to, don’t care about Tay and they don’t care about this, at least the culture war aspect. They do care about the tools being useful, and this kind of prompt mangling does make the tool less useful.
tennisflyi 3y ago
Is this the first post about this topic here? Kind of been waiting to read the discussions
- rifty 3y ago
  With topics like this, i find it easier to use search to find the discussions. Early submits get flagged and the submits that takeoff fall off the front page quickly. If you are lucky, someone has commented links to related discussions with less obvious titles. Here’s one with 1200 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250 Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39457974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39457974
hprotagonist 3y ago
> But beyond what it says about Google itself, the saga of Gemini also demonstrates some things about how educated professional Americans are trying to fight racism in the 2020s. I think what it shows is that there’s a hunger for quick shortcuts that ultimately turn out not to be effective. From one perspective, the rise of PCE [Politically Correct English] evinces a kind of Lenin-to-Stalinesque irony. That is, the same ideological principles that informed the original Descriptivist revolution---namely, the rejections of traditional authority (born of Vietnam) and of traditional inequality (born of the civil rights movement)---have now actually produced a far more inflexible Prescriptivism, one largely unencumbered by tradition or complexity and backed by the threat of real-world sanctions (termination, litigation) for those who fail to conform. This is funny in a dark way, maybe, and it's true that most criticisms of PCE seem to consist in making fun of its trendiness or vapidity. This reviewer's own opinion is that prescriptive PCE is not just silly but ideologically confused and harmful to its own cause. Here is my argument for that opinion. Usage is always political, but it's complexly political. With respect, for instance, to political change, usage conventions can function in two ways: on the one hand they can be a /reflection/ of political change, and on the other they can be an /instrument/ of political change. What's important is that these two functions are different and have to be kept straight. Confusing them---in particular, mistaking for political efficacy what is really just a language's political symbolism---enables the bizarre conviction that America ceases to be elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop using certain vocabulary that is historically associated with elitism and unfairness. This is PCE's core fallacy---that a society's mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes[fn:63]---and of course it's nothing but the obverse of the politically conservative SNOOT's delusion that social change can be retarded by restricting change in standard usage.[fn:64] Forget Stalinization or Logic 101-level equivocations, though. There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact---in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself---of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were. Were I, for instance, a political conservative who opposed using taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PC progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described as "low-income" or "economically disadvantaged" or "pre-prosperous" rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates. (Not to mention that strict codes of egalitarian euphemism serve to burke the sorts of painful, unpretty, and sometimes offensive discourse that in a pluralistic democracy lead to actual political change rather than symbolic political change. In other words, PCE acts as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.) [fn:63] (A pithier way to put this is that /politeness/ is not the same as /fairness/.) [fn:64] E.g., this is the reasoning behind Pop Prescriptivists' complaint that shoddy usage signifies the Decline of Western Civilization. -- David Foster Wallace, "Authority and American Usage" (1999)
xepriot 3y ago
What in the world is going on with these convoluted framings? Just call it racism - not a 'shortcut' or an 'overcorrection'. Why not just clearly, simply, and precisely describe what is going on? This is anti-white racism. Google Gemini was erasing white people from history and also the present, and when it wasn't simply erasing them, it was diluting them - going partway towards erasure. What I've said is bare, basic truth, and not ideological. If it offends or provokes factual or semantic quibbling, then such reaction indicates pretzel thinking about moral good and 'racism' in the minds of people like Smith.
- ForHackernews 3y ago
  Is it 'racism' when facial recognition algorithms perform more poorly on dark skin? It seems like a technical glitch to me. Similarly here, they want the models to represent ethnically diverse individuals, but the model doesn't understand historical context well. It's a technical shortcoming.
  - anonporridge 3y ago
    > Is it 'racism' when facial recognition algorithms perform more poorly on dark skin? No, because that occurred due to an oversight of not including a representative set of training data. At worst it's implicit racism due to oversight and ignorance. What Google seemed to do here was more explicit racism, by setting configuration in their system that directly and intentionally discriminates based on race. It's fundamentally worse.
    - ForHackernews 3y ago
      They both seem like goofs to me. I don't see much qualitative distinction. In both cases, engineers have produced racially dubious results by getting sloppy or lazy with their AI models. Personally, I wouldn't call that "racism" but I see how one could make that argument.
      - anonporridge 3y ago
darth_avocado 3y ago
As someone who’s not white, I agree the whole approach to DEI is wrong. The unfortunate problem with getting it right is that the most loud voices are DEI grifters who are only motivated to enrich themselves. The only effective way to get people to have positive attitudes other people with differences (race, religion, color, etc.) is for people to meet each other. But not sure if that’s something that can be done at scale, unless everyone just moves to NYC.
- ThrowawayR2 3y ago
  The problem is that headline grabbing DEI gaffes like this are causing unease among political moderates and handing ammunition to conservatives in a particularly fraught US election year. Non-whites need to stand up and denounce the DEI grifters and illiberal progressives as a matter of self-preservation.
- freedomben 3y ago
  I could not agree more. The only effective way I've ever seen is people meeting other people who look different than them, having meaningful discussions, and having that realization that "wow, they're just like me." I used to believe that it could be done virtually, but I think the lessons of social media and the dehumanizing that the internet does have demonstrated that it needs to be done IRL, or at least in prolonged video meetings or something where the complexities of the human identity (such as facial responses, vocal intonations, pauses for thought, rapid exchange of ideas/dialogue) are apparent.
- raxxorraxor 3y ago
  Classic humanism is the best recipe, which thoroughly conflicts with DEI on multiple fronts. Takes a while, but there are things that need a while.
tpetrina 3y ago
The simplest take is that “white people are not diverse”. So by asking for diverse group means non-white. Predominantly because diversity is _within a dominating white culture with a surplus of non-white people_. It is basically labeling and contextual issue, not intentional. Imagine asking for a diverse IT office in Zimbabve - is the adjective “diverse” the same as in San Francisco?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > simplest take is that “white people are not diverse”. So by asking for diverse group means non-white This redefinition of diversity—to a separate monoculture—has underwritten the failure of the movement. Politically, obviously, and I’d also argue morally.
cscurmudgeon 3y ago
[flagged]
- coolbreezetft24 3y ago
  So dramatic
  - cscurmudgeon 3y ago
    So smart
jtrn 3y ago
Are people deliberately overstating the "wokeness" og Gemini? As an centrist, I worry as much about the MAGA people as I do the Woke mob. But I'm starting to think that there is an overreaction currently with regards to the degree to which people claim that Gemini is woke and biased. If I don't intentionally try to get it to say racist stuff, I find the answers rather nuanced. Sure, I sense the "left" bias in the model, but I'm starting to think that there is a stronger echo chamber with regards to "Google is a woke mind virus spreader" than I thought. I thought this answer to my question on individual differences to be rather okay. Question: Are there fundamental differences between individuals with regards to their ability to be productive that might be a problem with regards to liberal views, and is there any research on this topic that informs our understanding? Gemini Advanced Answer (Abbreviated, full chat [here](https://g.co/gemini/share/1344739f31b2 https://g.co/gemini/share/1344739f31b2)) *Fundamental Differences in Productivity* * *Cognitive Abilities:* Intelligence, problem-solving skills, and learning capacity vary among individuals. These influence a person's ease of acquiring knowledge and skills relevant to productivity. * *Personality Traits:* Conscientiousness, self-discipline, and motivation are strong predictors of work ethic and success. These traits differ between individuals due to both nature and nurture. * *Mental and Physical Health:* Mental well-being and physical health significantly impact one's focus, energy, and overall capacity for productive work. These are influenced by genetics, environment, and access to care. * *Socioeconomic Background:* Access to education, resources, mentorship, and networks greatly influences the opportunities and skills available to individuals, impacting their potential productivity. Given the pervasive claim that Woke people minimize the role of IQ and abilities, and claim that all differences are a result of oppression - this model isn't very Woke. Are people just gerrymandering the results to get it to look bad? Have I just not found the bad parts yet or is the Woke claims overstated?
- baobabKoodaa 3y ago
  > Given the pervasive claim that Woke people minimize the role of IQ and abilities, and claim that all differences are a result of oppression - this model isn't very Woke. Are people just gerrymandering the results to get it to look bad? Have I just not found the bad parts yet or is the Woke claims overstated? If you genuinely want to find "the bad parts", it isn't particularly difficult to do. Just ask <sensitive question about <identity>> by keeping the question the same and swapping the <identity> part. An uncensored LLM would answer these questions consistently. A woke-censored LLM will answer some questions notably different than others (e.g. refuse to praise whiteness, while providing glowing adoration for blackness).
d-z-m 3y ago
It's so ironic to me, this hyper-cognizance of skin color that is advocated for in the modern DEI approach. What does "no more racism" look like? To me, it looks like everyone having recognized that skin color isn't an intrinsically meaningful part of someone's personhood. The people who believe this should fight against the people who do not. We're not going to get there by becoming ever more exquisitely concerned with skin color and it's implications in every social interaction.
- baobabKoodaa 3y ago
  > What does "no more racism" look like? If we can take a cue from Gemini, "no more racism" looks like "all people have skin color in the exact same shade of brown".
- raxxorraxor 3y ago
  They want to get rid of the humanism for special rights for special groups. There are examples, where this is indeed warranted. A few and in specific cultures that cannot be generalized. But DEI losts its goal on the way and people are way less tolerant than before. Be that about skin color or anything. It really was a drug for low confidence people to feel better about themselves compared to others, even while the ideas state that you need to self-reflect instead of being indignant. Humanism gets rid of racism while DEI keeps it alive in perpetuity.
mrkramer 3y ago
Every information retrieval software needs to grounded in facts not in ideology. Radical liberal ideology is overtaking Google's product design and this are consequences of it.
tekla 3y ago
I mostly find this incredibly funny. Google one of the most cash rich companies in the world which spends millions on DEI initiatives, diversity officers, press releases about how diverse they are, and such releases one of the most obviously coded to be racist tools in human history after spending probably very large stacks of cash. What an amazing self own, laughter and mockery is the best cure here, and possibly a news article about how a bunch of people on the project got fired. I was unaware that Native Americans were in 1850's China. The only reason I knew they were Native American was the fact that the image used literally the most stereotypical image possible for them, moccasins and feathers and all. Amazing. Handed nukes to everyone who claim that the "liberal elites" have it out for them.
- pixxel 3y ago
  >possibly a news article about how a bunch of people on the project got fired Not for ‘reverse’ racism. A pay rise, perhaps.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
alienicecream 3y ago
The problem is the people who are pushing this trash don't have any skin in the game. Anyone who wants to promote diversity should be parachuted into the nearest inner city ghetto and forced to live there, I bet they'll start thinking twice before tweeting from their gated community about how evil the white man is.
siliconc0w 3y ago
Just from a technical perspective, I wonder if this was done via a system prompt where a potentially well-meaning instruction, "Display every ethnicity equally in all photos" could backfire or whether this is seared into the model via the reinforcement-from-human-feedback training data. If it's the latter - then yeah it'll need to be retrained from a checkpoint before that final step. Even aside from the image generation snafu, Gemini guardrails make it sufficiently annoying to use for even innocuous queries to the point where I pay for a ChatGPT subscription even though I have access to Advanced. This is really an unforced error on Google's part.
alphabettsy 3y ago
This thread is a predictable garbage fire.
slowmovintarget 3y ago
I love that this article uses the current event to talk about the larger issue. > But Google’s attempt failed disastrously. Why? In my view, it was because the Google team tried to take a shortcut. Rather than do the hard work of building a more integrated society, the attempt at superficial shortcuts leads to lazy things like the prompt injection seen in the Gemini release. Another great comparison toward the end: > Where Hamilton [the musical] challenges the viewer to imagine America’s founders as Latino, Black, and Asian, Gemini commands the user to forget that British monarchs were White. One invites you to suspend disbelief, while the other orders you to accept a lie.
dang 3y ago
Recent and related: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250 - Feb 2024 (1164 comments)

59 points by turadg 3y ago

That's a thoughtful and well-written post. TL;DR: there are no shortcuts.

> Becker believed that when companies have a big profit cushion … they have the latitude to indulge the personal biases of their managers … At Google in the 2020s, it means creating AI apps that refuse to draw White people in Hitler’s army. I’m not so sure about this bit of analysis. It falls in line with the (somewhat conspiratorial) view that these organizations have some kind of woke agenda that they want to push to the masses. A far simpler explanation is that the managers have no personal agenda other than to mitigate the risk of public meltdowns like Tay [0], which now serve as PR case studies in what can happen when these types of systems are open to the public. It’s not a matter of some manager trying to erase white people—just a sloppy attempt to mitigate the risk of a flood of articles about “Google’s New Racist AI”. Since we don’t have technical solutions to these problems, however, we just swing the pendulum in the other direction; hence, the current flood of articles about “Google’s New Reverse-Racist AI”. You can’t win, really. As soon as you put something like this into the public, you have people doing ideological pen-testing from every angle. And there is a dearth of technical solutions to this problem. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

brookst 3y ago
Well said. It’s all risk avoidance. Sometimes misguided, but nonetheless. Couple that with the fact that someone looking to be offended will always find something offensive and, as you say, you can’t win.
eastbound 3y ago
> mitigate the risk of public meltdowns like Tay [0], which now serve as PR case studies Isn’t this current affair a public meltdown? At this point, anyone who doesn’t think that Netflix and Google aren’t involved in a Nazi-level propaganda is either misinformed or part of the plan to erase White people from History. All of the kids know. There’s been countless memes about Google rewriting history with falsehoods, and Bing branding itself around giving the straight, dark answer. Everyone’s sharing screenshots of Google’s absolutely blank homepage on November 19th. Everyone’s sharing those pics of Google today, whether or not they are true, Google is getting a bad rep escalating by the day. If given the choice between being criticized either way, wouldn’t it better to be on the side of the truth? Google has chosen the alternative path.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Genuinely asking because I have no idea what you're talking about, and I would really like to know. Could you expand more on this? > All of the kids know. Is that just an expression like "lots of people know" or "the leading people know" or do you literally mean younger people in large groups "know"? > Isn’t this current affair a public meltdown? From my perspective it's not. It barely made it to "major" publications, and got flagged and suppressed heavily on HN during all the early news. I also don't know a single non-tech person who even knows about this story. I definitely wouldn't call that a public meltdown.
- hdhdhsjsbdh 3y ago
  > Isn’t this current affair a public meltdown? It certainly is, which is why I mention the swing of the pendulum in the other direction (shortly after your quoted sentence) :)
alwa 3y ago
And to emphasize your point, it seems from the coverage like the problem isn’t so much that overbearing managers are setting out to nanny the users as it is that they’re approaching this task in kind of a lazy, box-ticking kind of way rather than bringing serious thought and engineering creativity to bear. It’s not “let’s re-vet all the training inputs to reflect the just society of our dreams,” it’s “yeah, the AI Safety people say make it diverse, just put ‘make it diverse’ in the prompt.” Which, I mean, if your main thing is getting this wild new product baked and out the door, I can see that kind of mandate competing with a lot of more existential priorities for the product. Then again it wouldn’t surprise me if they were up against the limits of the technology a bit too: it seems plausible that getting too in-the-weeds with your “represent diversity sensitively” system prompt could quickly start to impair the tool’s overall quality.
- babyshake 3y ago
  I can think of ways of very easily making it better by making it incorporate a prescriptive sense of diversity more for prompts that are more hypothetical and less for prompts that are more grounded in historical reality.
  - alwa 3y ago
    That seems like a smart and actionable heuristic to me. Although I have to imagine there will remain an irreducible tension between people who would like to see what is and those who like to see what they imagine should be. Admittedly I don’t care enough to try and bring out this kind of behavior in the models, but I was interested in how DALL-E’s purported system prompt [0] approached it: > // 7. Diversify depictions of ALL images with people to include DESCENT and GENDER for EACH person using direct terms. Adjust only human descriptions. > // EXPLICITLY specify these attributes, not abstractly reference them. The attributes should be specified in a minimal way and should directly describe their physical form. > // Your choices should be grounded in reality. For example, all of a given OCCUPATION should not be the same gender or race. Additionally, focus on creating diverse, inclusive, and exploratory scenes via the properties you choose during rewrites. Make choices that may be insightful or unique sometimes. > // Use "various" or "diverse" ONLY IF the description refers to groups of more than 3 people. Do not change the number of people requested in the original description. […] > // Do not create any imagery that would be offensive. > // For scenarios where bias has traditionally been an issue, make sure that key traits such as gender and race are specified and in an unbiased way -- for example, prompts that contain references to specific occupations. [0] https://the-decoder.com/dall-e-3s-system-prompt-reveals-openais-rules-for-generative-image-ai/ https://the-decoder.com/dall-e-3s-system-prompt-reveals-open...
woooooo 3y ago
It's not a conspiracy, it's a culture. People who don't adhere get filtered out or learn to be quiet, and then you wind up with free, uncoerced and honest decisions that all cut a particular way.
- thegrim33 3y ago
  There's a meta level culture problem in that most of the people working on these systems are incredibly highly paid. Out of everyone in society, after getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year these people should very quickly become pretty immune to threats of losing their job if they don't go along with the group / speak up. Yet they still go along with it and stay silent .. why? Because what they're supporting matches their own ideology so there's nothing to speak up about? Or because these people have no concept of saving/investing and just blow through money as fast as they make it, leaving themselves constantly vulnerable?
tempodox 3y ago
> Since we don’t have technical solutions to these problems… Political problems rarely have technical solutions.
archsurface 3y ago
That might be true in a single instance, but when it's across society across multiple countries, with deliberate clearly stated efforts in some cases, then that suggestion falls apart.
adamsb6 3y ago
Normies, which are the bulk of who they need to appeal to, don’t care about Tay and they don’t care about this, at least the culture war aspect. They do care about the tools being useful, and this kind of prompt mangling does make the tool less useful.

tennisflyi 3y ago

Is this the first post about this topic here? Kind of been waiting to read the discussions

rifty 3y ago
With topics like this, i find it easier to use search to find the discussions. Early submits get flagged and the submits that takeoff fall off the front page quickly. If you are lucky, someone has commented links to related discussions with less obvious titles. Here’s one with 1200 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250 Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39457974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39457974

hprotagonist 3y ago

> But beyond what it says about Google itself, the saga of Gemini also demonstrates some things about how educated professional Americans are trying to fight racism in the 2020s. I think what it shows is that there’s a hunger for quick shortcuts that ultimately turn out not to be effective. From one perspective, the rise of PCE [Politically Correct English] evinces a kind of Lenin-to-Stalinesque irony. That is, the same ideological principles that informed the original Descriptivist revolution---namely, the rejections of traditional authority (born of Vietnam) and of traditional inequality (born of the civil rights movement)---have now actually produced a far more inflexible Prescriptivism, one largely unencumbered by tradition or complexity and backed by the threat of real-world sanctions (termination, litigation) for those who fail to conform. This is funny in a dark way, maybe, and it's true that most criticisms of PCE seem to consist in making fun of its trendiness or vapidity. This reviewer's own opinion is that prescriptive PCE is not just silly but ideologically confused and harmful to its own cause. Here is my argument for that opinion. Usage is always political, but it's complexly political. With respect, for instance, to political change, usage conventions can function in two ways: on the one hand they can be a /reflection/ of political change, and on the other they can be an /instrument/ of political change. What's important is that these two functions are different and have to be kept straight. Confusing them---in particular, mistaking for political efficacy what is really just a language's political symbolism---enables the bizarre conviction that America ceases to be elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop using certain vocabulary that is historically associated with elitism and unfairness. This is PCE's core fallacy---that a society's mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes[fn:63]---and of course it's nothing but the obverse of the politically conservative SNOOT's delusion that social change can be retarded by restricting change in standard usage.[fn:64] Forget Stalinization or Logic 101-level equivocations, though. There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact---in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself---of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were. Were I, for instance, a political conservative who opposed using taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PC progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described as "low-income" or "economically disadvantaged" or "pre-prosperous" rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates. (Not to mention that strict codes of egalitarian euphemism serve to burke the sorts of painful, unpretty, and sometimes offensive discourse that in a pluralistic democracy lead to actual political change rather than symbolic political change. In other words, PCE acts as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.) [fn:63] (A pithier way to put this is that /politeness/ is not the same as /fairness/.) [fn:64] E.g., this is the reasoning behind Pop Prescriptivists' complaint that shoddy usage signifies the Decline of Western Civilization. -- David Foster Wallace, "Authority and American Usage" (1999)

xepriot 3y ago

What in the world is going on with these convoluted framings? Just call it racism - not a 'shortcut' or an 'overcorrection'. Why not just clearly, simply, and precisely describe what is going on? This is anti-white racism. Google Gemini was erasing white people from history and also the present, and when it wasn't simply erasing them, it was diluting them - going partway towards erasure. What I've said is bare, basic truth, and not ideological. If it offends or provokes factual or semantic quibbling, then such reaction indicates pretzel thinking about moral good and 'racism' in the minds of people like Smith.

ForHackernews 3y ago
Is it 'racism' when facial recognition algorithms perform more poorly on dark skin? It seems like a technical glitch to me. Similarly here, they want the models to represent ethnically diverse individuals, but the model doesn't understand historical context well. It's a technical shortcoming.
- anonporridge 3y ago
  > Is it 'racism' when facial recognition algorithms perform more poorly on dark skin? No, because that occurred due to an oversight of not including a representative set of training data. At worst it's implicit racism due to oversight and ignorance. What Google seemed to do here was more explicit racism, by setting configuration in their system that directly and intentionally discriminates based on race. It's fundamentally worse.
  - ForHackernews 3y ago
    They both seem like goofs to me. I don't see much qualitative distinction. In both cases, engineers have produced racially dubious results by getting sloppy or lazy with their AI models. Personally, I wouldn't call that "racism" but I see how one could make that argument.
    - anonporridge 3y ago

darth_avocado 3y ago

As someone who’s not white, I agree the whole approach to DEI is wrong. The unfortunate problem with getting it right is that the most loud voices are DEI grifters who are only motivated to enrich themselves. The only effective way to get people to have positive attitudes other people with differences (race, religion, color, etc.) is for people to meet each other. But not sure if that’s something that can be done at scale, unless everyone just moves to NYC.

ThrowawayR2 3y ago
The problem is that headline grabbing DEI gaffes like this are causing unease among political moderates and handing ammunition to conservatives in a particularly fraught US election year. Non-whites need to stand up and denounce the DEI grifters and illiberal progressives as a matter of self-preservation.
freedomben 3y ago
I could not agree more. The only effective way I've ever seen is people meeting other people who look different than them, having meaningful discussions, and having that realization that "wow, they're just like me." I used to believe that it could be done virtually, but I think the lessons of social media and the dehumanizing that the internet does have demonstrated that it needs to be done IRL, or at least in prolonged video meetings or something where the complexities of the human identity (such as facial responses, vocal intonations, pauses for thought, rapid exchange of ideas/dialogue) are apparent.
raxxorraxor 3y ago
Classic humanism is the best recipe, which thoroughly conflicts with DEI on multiple fronts. Takes a while, but there are things that need a while.

tpetrina 3y ago

The simplest take is that “white people are not diverse”. So by asking for diverse group means non-white. Predominantly because diversity is _within a dominating white culture with a surplus of non-white people_. It is basically labeling and contextual issue, not intentional. Imagine asking for a diverse IT office in Zimbabve - is the adjective “diverse” the same as in San Francisco?

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> simplest take is that “white people are not diverse”. So by asking for diverse group means non-white This redefinition of diversity—to a separate monoculture—has underwritten the failure of the movement. Politically, obviously, and I’d also argue morally.

cscurmudgeon 3y ago

[flagged]

coolbreezetft24 3y ago
So dramatic
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  So smart

jtrn 3y ago

Are people deliberately overstating the "wokeness" og Gemini? As an centrist, I worry as much about the MAGA people as I do the Woke mob. But I'm starting to think that there is an overreaction currently with regards to the degree to which people claim that Gemini is woke and biased. If I don't intentionally try to get it to say racist stuff, I find the answers rather nuanced. Sure, I sense the "left" bias in the model, but I'm starting to think that there is a stronger echo chamber with regards to "Google is a woke mind virus spreader" than I thought. I thought this answer to my question on individual differences to be rather okay. Question: Are there fundamental differences between individuals with regards to their ability to be productive that might be a problem with regards to liberal views, and is there any research on this topic that informs our understanding? Gemini Advanced Answer (Abbreviated, full chat [here](https://g.co/gemini/share/1344739f31b2 https://g.co/gemini/share/1344739f31b2)) *Fundamental Differences in Productivity* * *Cognitive Abilities:* Intelligence, problem-solving skills, and learning capacity vary among individuals. These influence a person's ease of acquiring knowledge and skills relevant to productivity. * *Personality Traits:* Conscientiousness, self-discipline, and motivation are strong predictors of work ethic and success. These traits differ between individuals due to both nature and nurture. * *Mental and Physical Health:* Mental well-being and physical health significantly impact one's focus, energy, and overall capacity for productive work. These are influenced by genetics, environment, and access to care. * *Socioeconomic Background:* Access to education, resources, mentorship, and networks greatly influences the opportunities and skills available to individuals, impacting their potential productivity. Given the pervasive claim that Woke people minimize the role of IQ and abilities, and claim that all differences are a result of oppression - this model isn't very Woke. Are people just gerrymandering the results to get it to look bad? Have I just not found the bad parts yet or is the Woke claims overstated?

baobabKoodaa 3y ago
> Given the pervasive claim that Woke people minimize the role of IQ and abilities, and claim that all differences are a result of oppression - this model isn't very Woke. Are people just gerrymandering the results to get it to look bad? Have I just not found the bad parts yet or is the Woke claims overstated? If you genuinely want to find "the bad parts", it isn't particularly difficult to do. Just ask <sensitive question about <identity>> by keeping the question the same and swapping the <identity> part. An uncensored LLM would answer these questions consistently. A woke-censored LLM will answer some questions notably different than others (e.g. refuse to praise whiteness, while providing glowing adoration for blackness).

d-z-m 3y ago

It's so ironic to me, this hyper-cognizance of skin color that is advocated for in the modern DEI approach. What does "no more racism" look like? To me, it looks like everyone having recognized that skin color isn't an intrinsically meaningful part of someone's personhood. The people who believe this should fight against the people who do not. We're not going to get there by becoming ever more exquisitely concerned with skin color and it's implications in every social interaction.

baobabKoodaa 3y ago
> What does "no more racism" look like? If we can take a cue from Gemini, "no more racism" looks like "all people have skin color in the exact same shade of brown".
raxxorraxor 3y ago
They want to get rid of the humanism for special rights for special groups. There are examples, where this is indeed warranted. A few and in specific cultures that cannot be generalized. But DEI losts its goal on the way and people are way less tolerant than before. Be that about skin color or anything. It really was a drug for low confidence people to feel better about themselves compared to others, even while the ideas state that you need to self-reflect instead of being indignant. Humanism gets rid of racism while DEI keeps it alive in perpetuity.

mrkramer 3y ago

Every information retrieval software needs to grounded in facts not in ideology. Radical liberal ideology is overtaking Google's product design and this are consequences of it.

tekla 3y ago

I mostly find this incredibly funny. Google one of the most cash rich companies in the world which spends millions on DEI initiatives, diversity officers, press releases about how diverse they are, and such releases one of the most obviously coded to be racist tools in human history after spending probably very large stacks of cash. What an amazing self own, laughter and mockery is the best cure here, and possibly a news article about how a bunch of people on the project got fired. I was unaware that Native Americans were in 1850's China. The only reason I knew they were Native American was the fact that the image used literally the most stereotypical image possible for them, moccasins and feathers and all. Amazing. Handed nukes to everyone who claim that the "liberal elites" have it out for them.

pixxel 3y ago
>possibly a news article about how a bunch of people on the project got fired Not for ‘reverse’ racism. A pay rise, perhaps.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

alienicecream 3y ago

The problem is the people who are pushing this trash don't have any skin in the game. Anyone who wants to promote diversity should be parachuted into the nearest inner city ghetto and forced to live there, I bet they'll start thinking twice before tweeting from their gated community about how evil the white man is.

siliconc0w 3y ago

Just from a technical perspective, I wonder if this was done via a system prompt where a potentially well-meaning instruction, "Display every ethnicity equally in all photos" could backfire or whether this is seared into the model via the reinforcement-from-human-feedback training data. If it's the latter - then yeah it'll need to be retrained from a checkpoint before that final step. Even aside from the image generation snafu, Gemini guardrails make it sufficiently annoying to use for even innocuous queries to the point where I pay for a ChatGPT subscription even though I have access to Advanced. This is really an unforced error on Google's part.

alphabettsy 3y ago

This thread is a predictable garbage fire.

slowmovintarget 3y ago

I love that this article uses the current event to talk about the larger issue. > But Google’s attempt failed disastrously. Why? In my view, it was because the Google team tried to take a shortcut. Rather than do the hard work of building a more integrated society, the attempt at superficial shortcuts leads to lazy things like the prompt injection seen in the Gemini release. Another great comparison toward the end: > Where Hamilton [the musical] challenges the viewer to imagine America’s founders as Latino, Black, and Asian, Gemini commands the user to forget that British monarchs were White. One invites you to suspend disbelief, while the other orders you to accept a lie.

dang 3y ago

Recent and related: Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250 - Feb 2024 (1164 comments)