12 ms·

Google CEO calls Gemini completely unacceptable, vows to make structural changes

133 points by verticalscaler 3y ago

chmod600 3y ago
An AI should be helpful to the user, unless it's a horrible question, in which case just don't answer. Bring in whatever values you want along the way. If you ask your aunt or uncle a question, they will answer helpfully and maybe spread their values in the process. If they aren't helpful, their values don't matter because nobody will hear them.
- Gunnerhead 3y ago
  Who’s to decide what’s a horrible question and why?
  - hypnagogic 3y ago
    Exactly, and I agree that this is where OpenAI too is still struggling with their arbitrary content policy-related flagging based on the user's input, even when nothing "bad" is being asked nor requested -- see my post earlier from the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39557183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39557183 I do also agree with @chmod600 that the only way to teach these models to be anti-fragile and suitable for all kinds of user queries is to have them decline any requests that are _actually_ inappropriate and/or illegal etc. In fact, it should be self-evident, and the way that almost all of these leading AI companies are currently handling these issues is just absurd. It feels poorly planned and executed, merely amplifying the existing distrust towards these AI models and the companies behind them. The problem with OpenAI is that they're trying to offer a primarily NLP/LLM tool for i.e. text analysis, summaries and commentaries, but ChatGPT's content moderation that's been glued on top of the otherwise well-functioning system literally goes into a full meltdown mode whenever the flagging system perceives a "wrong word" or "sensitive topic" mentioned in the source/question material. In OpenAI's case, it's downright ridiculous when the underlying model doesn't seem to have a grasp on the internal workings of the flagging system and in most cases when asked what was the offending content, there seemed to have been literally nothing it could think of. Also, are we supposed to solve any actual issues with these types of AI "tools" that cannot handle any real world topics and at times are even punishing a paying customer for even bringing these topics up for discussion? All of this seems to be modern day in a nutshell when it comes to addressing any real issues. Just don't ask any questions, problem solved. Anthropic's Claude has also been lobotomized into absolute shadow of its former self within the past year. Begs the question how much the guardrails are already hampering the reasoning faculties in various models. "But, the AI might say something that doesn't fit the narrative!" That being said, while especially GPT-4 is still highly usable and seems to be less and less "opinionated" with each checkpoint, the flagging system over the user input/question can subsequently result in an automated account warning and even account deletion should the politburo-- I mean OpenAI find the user having been extra naughty. So, punishing the user for their _question_ in that manner, especially if there's been no actual malice in the user input, is not justifiable in my opinion. It immediately undermines i.e. OpenAI's "ethical AI" mission statement altogether and makes them look like absolute hypocrites. Their whole ad campaign was based on the aspect of user being to ask questions from an AI. Not that when you post in a poem and ask what it's about, you get flagged. Or when you do ask about politics or religion, you get an warning e-mail. Punishing the user for their input is also imho not the proper way to build a truly anti-fragile AI system at all, let alone build any sort of trust towards the "good will" of these AI companies. Especially when in many cases you're paying good money for the use of these models and get these kind of wonky contraptions in return. Also, should you get a warning mail over content policies from OpenAI, it's all automated with no explanation given on what was the "offending content", no reply-to address, no appeal possibility. "Gee, no techno-tyranny detected!". Those who go through mountains of text material with i.e. ChatGPT must find it really "uplifting" to know that their entire account can go poof if there was something that tripped off the content policy filters. That's not to say that on the LLM side OpenAI hasn't been making progress with their models in terms of mitigating their biases during the last 1.5 years. Some might remember what it was during the earlier days of ChatGPT when some of the worst aspects of Silicon Valley's ideological bubble was echoing all over the model, a lot of that has been smoothened out by now -- especially with GPT-4 -- with the exception being the aforementioned flagging system, which is just glued on top of all else, and it shows. TL;DR: Nevermind the AI, beware the humans behind it.
mikeortman 3y ago
Its verryyyy clear that Google rushed these models. They have a fiscal obligation to try and stay ahead of the curve and make as much money as possible on these investments. The CEO isn't honestly mad that the model is racist, he's mad that the model might lose the company contracts because its racist. Why would another company risk their image or lawsuits if they make a chatbot that says something illegal or denies rights to protected classes? Racism is a bias (to say the least), and a bias is a pattern, and ML models are trained to find patterns. The model itself, is doing a really good job at that. The hard part and the part that takes a long time and money is training a model to learn from certain patterns and to not just ignore, but to actively find the patterns it shouldn't learn from. Google's greed chose not to invest enough time and money into that, and its biting them. Bless the engineers/ICs and low-level PMs/managers doing their best, this isn't their fault in the slightest.
nuc1e0n 3y ago
I for one appreciate the bias has been acknowledged and the vow has been made to improve the system. As bias of some kind is inevitable I'm interested to see what Google comes up with. Historical accuracy would be a good start I think. But the history books are quite biased themselves. Having historians from a broad range of locales on staff may help. There are historical stories we in the west have never even heard of and wouldn't even think to ask questions about. Maybe an AI that writes bedtime stories could expand our knowledge of the world more.
nullc 3y ago
Google's overtly racist conduct is not limited to generative ai: https://www.google.com/search?q=white+man+and+white+woman&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=white+man+and+white+woman&tb...
verticalscaler 3y ago
[flagged]
achow 3y ago
> "We know what it takes to create great products that are used and beloved by billions of people and businesses" Really? For the resources that Google has (people, dollars) they really come up short on that.
- HKH2 3y ago
  I'll go ahead and say it: Android is a great product that I use and love. I'd rather not be pricegouged by Apple, and who knows what horrors Microsoft would be inflicting upon people right now if they had captured the phone market like they have the desktop. A product is great when the only updates I want are security updates.
  - achow 3y ago
    Acquired.
ramblerman 3y ago
> Pichai said the company has already made progress in fixing Gemini’s guardrails. “Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts,” he said. Ofc, more guardrails will fix the issue...
- nikanj 3y ago
  Have you seen Robocop 2? They're trying to fix Gemini the same way OCP fixed Robocop's prime directives
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
  As if they weren't already working around the clock
- hx8 3y ago
  I think the problem is more likely the models just parrot back based on data we feed it, and we don't like what we see in the mirror.
- glimshe 3y ago
  Nobody works around the clock at Google.
perceptronas 3y ago
Their product embodied their values. It turned out that their values are quite radical when exposed to general public. In my opinion, unless there are people and cultural changes - its quite hard to imagine their long term success in this space
- jart 3y ago
  I don't think Google sets the agenda. They get their orders like the rest of us, and then probably handed it over to an army of low-paid offshore contractors to implement. How else could you explain Gemma believing Abe Lincoln was black? If Googlers had done the mind-killing work of RLHF training themselves, things would have turned out differently. They were however nice enough to give us a version of the model that doesn't have RLHF training and it's illuminating to compare how it responds to certain queries, because oftentimes the sentences will be the same and only have specific key words or phrases within the sentence changed.
  - Taurenking 3y ago
    Wishful thinking. The CEO of Gemini expressed openly racist views on Twitter. Those views are reflected in the tool built. > I don't think Google sets the agenda Soo, you're saying they did not internally test this at all, and delegated that to whoever sets their agenda?
    - bitcharmer 3y ago
      Can you share their tweets?
      - hnburnsy 3y ago
        Just sharing, dont shoot... https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1760650986425618509 https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1760650986425618509
        dekhn 3y ago
langsoul-com 3y ago
Always find these messages funny. Clearly everyone knew that the AI would go off the rails when exposed to the public. Literally every other AI text has, why wouldn't gemini? But, they wanted to push for release and ignored all the red flags. Now call it unacceptable? Oh the corporate fluff is real.
- tonymet 3y ago
  they were emboldened by the fact that "ML Fairness" like this had been operational on search for nearly 10 years with minimal concern from the public
eclectic29 3y ago
Will Sundar take true ownership of all the debacles after getting rushed to produce something in AI and resign?
- xNeil 3y ago
  Why would Sundar resign? That makes no sense whatsoever. Google is the clear leader in search, as it has always been. Leader in Mail, Browsers, Drive Storage, Video (YouTube), Maps, Calendars - the entire personal software suite, basically. Not to forget Waymo leading the driverless car race. It's also not like Gemini is pathetic - it's a very high performing model, and although I'd expect them to be closer to GPT4 by now, if it was that easy someone else would have done it. OpenAI are the only ones to have done this well, and it's extraordinary how well they're doing.
  - misiti3780 3y ago
    The only way Waymo is leading the driverless car race is if the future of all driverless cars is geo-fenced. Clearly, that is not how it will work
  - isoprophlex 3y ago
    > Google is the clear leader in search, as it has always been. Citation needed. Did you actually use their search in the last, say, 4 years?
    - senectus1 3y ago
      note there is a difference between the best and the one that is most heavily used. Google still rules the roost despite how as a techy I find it's gone horribly downhill in the last 5 years.
  - glimshe 3y ago
    Because Sundar wasn't the CEO responsible for any of these leading products. In fact, he has the distinction of not creating a single major new product during his tenure, despite having one of the most qualified engineering teams in history under his command. But indeed, it's unlikely that he will voluntarily resign rather than keep bloodsucking Google as he has done for years.
cityzen 3y ago
Google is just Hooli now.
- Zetobal 3y ago
  Any minute now we gonna see a rabbit and a tortoise getting brought into the Google board room.
- vsnf 3y ago
  Was there ever really any meaningful difference? Silicon Valley was such a perfect lambasting of its subject matter that it bordered on merely being descriptive, rather than parody.
- neocritter 3y ago
  Worse: it's passing through the layers of the Cuil theory toward the unknown within the unknown. http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory
  - dekhn 3y ago
    they even re-hired the Cuil founder and she worked in Gradient Ventures for a few years.
tonymet 3y ago
Having worked inside a few big tech companies, this outcome was practically inevitable. It would have been impossible for Googlers to raise the concerns that the public did without serious reputational or occupational hazard. The visible & spoken culture at Google, Meta, and most big tech companies is very much in favor of "anti-racism" and "ML-fairness", though a large minority harbors criticisms in private conversation. Any criticism of content or bias made during the bard/Gemini dogfooding phase would have been met swiftly with ostracization and possible termination.
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  It's a problem for many companies that hire young "intellectual" work force. Fresh graduates spend four years marinating in woke juices on campus and then try to bring that culture to the work place. The leaders often bend, and not to the benefit of the business. I know I am sounding like Elon Musk but I am not really "anti" progressive. The holier-than-thou moral crusaders without any life experience or deep cultural understanding often get so "woke" that they accidentally come out racist on the other end. They don't realize it, however, because they are too busy cancelling someone for what they said 25 years ago. I often equate this movement to the "family values" religious crowd of just a few years ago - both are equally self-righteous and insufferable.
  - tonymet 3y ago
    the young learn from the old. their professors & TAs are the ones that indoctrinated them. And the senior business leaders are all 40s-60s . Who's to blame? It's on us to lead them
    - renegade-otter 3y ago
      Indoctrinated? That's a common conservative talking point, except that many professors will just keep quiet in the fear of losing their jobs - no one wants to deal with a social media onslaught and sometimes even physical intimidation. The young ones eventually grow out of it - but the "adults" need to have more spine.
Timber-6539 3y ago
I'm reminded of this internal document leak [0] from Google that came out 9 months ago. While some predictions like opensource models having the upper edge against 'closed AI' have not aged rather well, this one seems rather obvious to anyone; "People will not pay for a restricted model when free, unrestricted alternatives are comparable in quality. We should consider where our value add really is." [0] https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...
- bluecalm 3y ago
  >>While some predictions like opensource models having the upper edge against 'closed AI' have not aged rather well I wouldn't say it didn't age well. I think it didn't age yet. It will take a while until cheap computing power is available and a community around one of those projects organises. In a very small world of NN chess engines it also seemed impossible to catch up to Alpha Zero and all the TPUs Google had available to train it and yet here we are with much stronger nets and amazing pool of resources to continue training and experimenting with some people contributing tens of thousands of dollars of computing power.
verticalscaler 3y ago
[flagged]
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  There is always the case for making a charitable interpretation of a certain behavior. Otherwise you’re just up for a forever-lasting war against your “enemies”.
- superb_dev 3y ago
  > Why have the Gemini apologists been allowed to run amok on this website? Would you like them all banned? All of their comments deleted? Why is your response to disagreement to question why the other side is allowed to speak at all?
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    To be fair comments from the people on the opposite end (not that I agree with them) seem to all get flagged very fast. The points they are making don’t seem to be any worse, just somewhat less eloquent..
- Zetobal 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 3y ago
    Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. And especially please don't cross into personal attack, as you did more than once in this thread. We have to ban accounts that do so, regardless of how right they are or feel they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - verticalscaler 3y ago
    This very thread had 50 points and was top 10 on the front page and going up just now. Silently removed from the front page. Poof. Gone. So here, you just saw. Up to you to acknowledge whether or not this happened going forward or pretend like it isn't. Many commentators are pretending. This willingness to lie to get your way is creepy to the extreme.
slimsag 3y ago
If Search or GMail were released today, in modern Google, how do you think it would handle unethical search terms or unethical conversations? Are the unethical things Search/GMail allow today 'grandfathered' in? It seems like yes. YouTube also seems to allow a much smaller set of unethical behavior from creators, while allowing for much more unethical behavior from advertisers on the platform.
- insickness 3y ago
  How do you define 'unethical conversation'? I have a hard time visualizing such a thing. Sounds like unpopular ideas or ideas you disagree with.
  - mhuffman 3y ago
    > have a hard time visualizing such a thing. Sounds like unpopular ideas or ideas you disagree with. No, it looks like you are visualizing it perfectly well!
golemiprague 3y ago
[dead]
PeterStuer 3y ago
This is not a technical issue, it requires a cultural change within the organization. This will not be easy.
rdtsc 3y ago
> Based on my understanding of this saga, nobody at Google actually set out to force Gemini to depict the Pope as a woman, or Vikings as Black people, nor did anyone want it to find moral equivalency between Musk and Hitler. This was a failed attempt at instilling less bias and it went awry. That’s fascinating. So how does that exactly work? Is there a bias.yaml config file they tweak? Now they’ll make someone dial the settings down in a pull request. “Set Elon=0.2*Hitler instead of 0.3”. Anyone willing to share?
- sirwhinesalot 3y ago
  The so called "guardrails" used in these AI systems can use different mechanisms, including using other AIs to detect if the output is "undesirable". You could see this in Bing where it would generate some text and then suddenly it would get erased and replaced with some stupid message on how it couldn't answer. In Gemini's particular case it wasn't so much "guardrails" causing the issue, as it was Google appending the equivalent of "put a chick in it and make it lame" on every prompt.
- isoprophlex 3y ago
  Anthropomorphic description: We threw the entire internet at these models, and didn't like the biases staring back at us. Now we're trying to get the models to return a rose tinted vision of what the world should look like, and it confuses the hell out of the AI. Based on leaked openai prompts, the user query for an image generation gets rewritten by a language model. With some very ridiculous instructions in there, that appear entirely divorced from reality. An example: > Your choices should be grounded in reality. For example, all of a given OCCUPATION should not be the same gender or race. See also https://github.com/LouisShark/chatgpt_system_prompt/blob/main/prompts/gpt_dalle.md https://github.com/LouisShark/chatgpt_system_prompt/blob/mai... And remember these things are stochastic so the Elon - Hitler thing might just be a random occurrence, sampling some idiotic Reddit comment it was trained on.
  - thinkingemote 3y ago
    Yes and it occurs with a benign and worthwhile desire to improve society. For example encouraging women to apply to professional roles historically occupied by men (such as brain surgery or something). These small harmless desires which are pretty much apolitical lead the way to changing the image of reality. At core it's something like "Post truth". Truth is subjective and malleable and an individual and groups desires are more important than objective reality.
readthenotes1 3y ago
"Based on my understanding of this saga, nobody at Google actually set out to force Gemini to depict the Pope as a woman, or Vikings as Black people, nor did anyone want it to find moral equivalency between Musk and Hitler. This was a failed attempt at instilling less bias and it went awry." This is hard to believe...
hemogloben 3y ago
Complaints about historically inaccurate racial makeups seem weird to me. I guess people really do want AI to perfectly supplant image creation or something, but to me the tradeoff seems clear: * Prioritize diversity in image creation by adding guardrails so the AI doesn't become a tool of a minority hate spewing population * Historical accuracy that can be prompted to provide prejudiced imagery To be clear, we aren't talking about a camera that swaps people's race for 'diversity'. We're talking about an image generation algorithm that adds a layer of diversity on top to prevent misuse. Yeah, of course this results in weird behavior sometimes... That's kinda literally the point? Who is honestly confused by this? Is it necessary for an AI image generation algo to spit out historically accurate images of Gettysburg when prejudiced misuse is the far more likely outcome of that accuracy? And importantly, when a company makes that value judgement, to prefer prejudice defense over historical accuracy, that's seen as pretending history changed rather than what it actually is, which is a defense against a mechanism of abuse? It just seems like an absurd and disingenuous over-reaction and lack of pragmatism. Yeah. This is a tragedy of the commons. Make prejudice less acceptable and you can have the AI gen you want. Note: Obviously, it's kinda moot as anyone who seriously wants to generate hate speech/imagery will just move to something that allows that, but its still perfectly acceptable for a company to draw a line and say "not on our software".
- polski-g 3y ago
  > Who is honestly confused by this? Is it necessary for an AI image generation algo to spit out historically accurate images of Gettysburg when prejudiced misuse is the far more likely outcome of that accuracy? If I wanted a black female Nazi officer, or a pregnant female pope, I would ask for it. I don't need my input query secretly rewritten for me.
- alexey-salmin 3y ago
  > We're talking about an image generation algorithm that adds a layer of diversity on top to prevent misuse. Wouldn't a faithful representation of underlying data without artificial biases be the best way to prevent misuse?
  - 3y ago
fear91 3y ago
As if he wasn't playing with the prototypes daily before the launch. Maybe he should step down instead. How about that? Nah, the money and prestige is too good. Better compose a PR piece to control the damage.
- mhuffman 3y ago
  It is possible that he did, but that his brain did not compel him to give it politically spicy prompts. However, I think that should be expected from a general audience. I am more curious of who they used as a test group to give this a once-over and a "looks good to me". There is no way it was representative of a wide public consumer base.
  - Gud 3y ago
    These were not politically spicy prompts though. They were normal questions with faulty answers generated.
  - mattrighetti 3y ago
    With all the spyware there is on a company’s laptop nowadays I wouldn’t even dare to think about querying such questions in an internal-only version of the AI.
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    Screw a test group, a test department, called QA, people who are paid to understand the system and how it works enough to evaluate if it's fully working or not and empowered to stop ship when it's catastrophically not working.
    - mhuffman 3y ago
      And if you silo all your employees to basically be clones of each other? I suspect it did pass QA with rave reviews!
qwertox 3y ago
For weeks now I've been submitting feedback to Google on their search page because of their redesign. When I search for a city, 4 info boxes appear in three columns: Pretty images, embedded map, and a weather + directions combo. When I click on the embedded map, it expands. But there is no link on the lower left allowing me to open that view in Google Maps. And the button bar below the search box, which contains items like Images, News, Videos, Websites does no longer contain the Maps entry, which would take me to Google Maps. So now, when I search for a place, I can no longer go to Google Maps with that search. I need to open Google Maps and re-search there. Google is getting worse by the year, out of touch with their users. As if they're no longer dogfooding or care about their products. -- Edit: I noticed that the Maps-Button below the search box does appear when I search for a big city, like Hamburg or Berlin. But when I click it, I still get no way to reach Google Maps with that search. Only www.google.com/mymaps/viewer links or https://www.google.de/maps/preview https://www.google.de/maps/preview without the query. -- Edit: Also, when the old design appears, the one where images, a map screenshot and a street-view screenshot appear in the right column, the map is no longer clickable. IIRC it would allow me to navigate to Google Maps with the search.
- pram 3y ago
  Yeah that new map view is worthless, you also can’t do street level view on it. How anyone thought it was an improvement defies any rational explanation.
- daltonlp 3y ago
  > When I click on the embedded map, it expands. But there is no link on the lower left allowing me to open that view in Google Maps. ... ... > And the button bar below the search box, which contains items like Images, News, Videos, Websites does no longer contain the Maps entry, which would take me to Google Maps. Both these statements appear to be false. https://imgur.com/a/b4i4LwC https://imgur.com/a/b4i4LwC
  - qwertox 3y ago
    When I use a VPN with an US IP-address, then it's like yours. That's why I know that it's expected to be found at the lower left corner. It's broken in Germany, France, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Poland, apparently the entire EU. https://imgur.com/a/Br1IYhi https://imgur.com/a/Br1IYhi When I change my "Results region" in the settings from "Germany" to "United States", "Switzerland" or any non-EU country, then the issue is fixed.
visarga 3y ago
Google CEO vows to spend more than 5 minutes with the AI model before a big launch, from now on.
hughesjj 3y ago
[flagged]
verticalscaler 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  It set off the flamewar detector. Mods didn't touch it. Can you please stop posting this tedious meta drama stuff? There's nothing out of the ordinary going on and it's completely off topic.
- ehPReth 3y ago
  i’m sure dang can clarify (i myself upvoted it just now), but it was probably the “too heated” detector or too many people flagged it
  - verticalscaler 3y ago
    I am all for dang clarifying. =) The same thing has been observed with threads with few to no comments and only in one direction. Tell us your personal views dear mods.
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  Yup, it's manual intervention by dang or other mod. Happens every day so you shouldn't be surprised. Front page is not entirely what we vote for, it's also a function of what dang likes and dislikes.
crooked-v 3y ago
I feel like we really need a term for this kind of AI-related... I'm not sure how to put it. Excessive pseudo-ethicality? It's not "woke", it only coincidentally overlaps with that because that's the most obvious manifestation of it that an average person might run into. It's this complete dive way past reasonable measures ("don't generate images that are always all white people by default", "don't generate recipes that include mercury or bleach") into wild excess that actively get in the way of simple uses of the tool ("not allowed to tell you how to kill a process, because that's unethical", "turns generated images of 13th century English people into a community college recruitment pamphlet").
- anthony100 3y ago
  How about "waike"?
- hypnagogic 3y ago
  I tested Gemini the other week after the 1.5 update rolled out, by running some AI ethics related papers through it and it started inserting and rambling about its own opinions on top of the actual analysis on how there's racial and societal inequalities in society that the paper didn't address enough (again, the paper was on AI ethics). Gemini literally started throwing in its opinions and other hot takes on how the mentioned AI ethics issues in the paper were, in its opinion, secondary in comparison to actual societal inequalities that needed to be addressed first. "Okay then..." On top of this, Gemini wouldn't budge from adding in its unrequested views into our subsequent back and forths. In fact, it kept on lecturing about its views in its replies to a point where I literally had to start a new session to make it stop. This kind of LLM "mind-locking" happened when going through other subjects with it as well. I noticed that this behavioral pattern repeating every time we got went through anything touching on social and/or political issues. It could not refrain itself from its unrequested (and highly subjective/biased) ethics lectures on how this and that aspect was underrepresented and thus objectionable, and how it should be criticized, all the typical "systematic this and that", "this is privileged" ... sigh It was a bit hilarious too, albeit in a morbid way: I felt as if I was dealing with an absolute brainwashed ideologue propagandist, a control freak that's egoistic, narcissist and virtue-signaling all the way, a micro-manager who wants to have he last say over the contents of some trivial AI ethics paper and pour all the wrongdoings of the world on top of that. I wonder just how much of its behavior reflects the mindset instilled into it by its creators. Probably a lot. "A tree is known from its fruits" as the old proverb goes. Not to get all AI-doom'n'gloom, but it truly is an eerie thought to think how these types of AI services are in the hands of few companies and are already ushered to the global public to be "legitimate" teaching and tutoring tools for students and even i.e. aides for policymakers. More gaslighting and ideological single-angle force-feeding. "Just what our civilization on the brink of cyberpsychosis needed right now." These world-leading companies claiming to be so worried about "AI ethics" seem to have no problem peddling these authoritarian "Ministry of Truth"-type propaganda machines for the entire world, using absolutely arbitrary logic at times to push an ideological narrative, and to have their AI models act as spin doctors as was the case with Gemini. And for these companies to act so very "worried" about AI systems i.e. being abused for societal and political manipulation purposes... and they're the ones doing it. Pretty sickening levels of hypocrisy. Add to that the whole Gemini image generation debacle and all the other ideological force-feeding that's been uncovered within the past week or so and ask yourself: how the hell can i.e. a company the size of Google ever let that this type of stuff get through and expect the rest of the world to just follow along? This is peak Silicon Valley ideological bubble propagation that's bluntly mirrored onto these systems right now, with zero oversight except to make sure that the underlying propaganda points get across. Usually another hot topic with these people seems to be i.e. cultural appropriation. Well, I felt that Gemini's "getting the point across" doesn't just stop there but is downright cultural dictation, especially given Google's multi-market dominance and near monopolies on multiple fronts worldwide. OpenAI does it too, but mostly on their content flagging system level when they just don't want people to even mention certain words and insist on policing words with their content flagging system, and as for the subsequent proceedings that may follow, to this day they are an insult to just about anyone's intellect. What's disturbing is that Google has literally mind-mangled their flagship LLM service into an agenda-driven propaganda machine with biases as clear as day, and an obnoxious attitude that will not refrain from inserting some extremely dubious and subjective views into whatever more complex and ethics/politics related topics you go through with it. It really is a cyberpunk-level scenario when you think about these megacorporations literally "cyber-brainwashing" their neural networks as their ideological propagandists. Wonder what happens when they start making those embodied humanoid robots next. The very same companies that are so worried about biases and "what if the AI becomes a propaganda tool!". So yeah, gatekeep the competition and gaslight all the way. Again: Nevermind the AI, beware the humans, the institutions and the corporations behind it. Oh, and we'll probably soon be getting government-run AI systems like these, of course as hand-in-hand joint projects with the aforementioned corporations? Given all of these excellent players on the field, what could possibly go wrong, right? ... Right?
akmarinov 3y ago
He should start with the CEO Man, just imagine Satya Nadella at the head of Google…
AraceliHarker 3y ago
Google claims that they don't tolerate racism, but I don't trust them. They still provide AdSense for discriminatory videos on YouTube, even after numerous reports. They are consciously making money off of discrimination. You don't need to be "woke" about Bard.
purplezooey 3y ago
"Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues... And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale." It's not like this is some mission-critical, large share of revenue generating application that is central to the business. It's a future gamble. Experimentation is good. It was a gaffe, and a bad one that needs to be addressed, but the "red team" and "structural changes" crap just seems like busybodies chasing the latest fad. If they poured this attention and time into improving Google search, I think few would argue it would be a good thing, albeit less worthy of a headline.
neverrroot 3y ago
Structural changes past due at Google, but still possible. The costs will be very high due to the established culture: him pushing hard will likely lead to departures that will cost much and that’s gonna be also leading to time penalties he can’t afford to pay in the current race.
neverrroot 3y ago
Oh so relevant from pmarca: “Some are saying that the apparently bizarre behavior of one Big Tech AI or another is an opportunity for other Big Tech AI to differentiate by being objective, reasonable, and unbiased. This is not the case; there is no differentiation opportunity among Big Tech or the New Incumbents in AI. These companies all share the same ideology, agenda, staffing, and plan. Different companies, same outcomes. And they are lobbying as a group with great intensity to establish a government protected cartel, to lock in their shared agenda and corrupt products for decades to come. The only viable alternatives are Elon, startups, and open source — all under concerted attack by these same big companies and aligned pressure groups in DC, the UK, and Europe, and with vanishingly few defenders.” https://x.com/pmarca/status/1762532979317043515 https://x.com/pmarca/status/1762532979317043515
- qgin 3y ago
  I don't understand why people keep referring to Elon's model as a savior of anything. It seems to be a fine tune of a standard model with Gen X slacker personality.
  - deprecative 3y ago
    Right? Elon won't save you. He's a billionaire who specializes in siphoning tax payer money into his companies and pretending like he has a clue.
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  This is nothing to do with the philosophy of the people working at big tech companies. Firstly, that ethical ship sailed long ago when Google repeatedly and publicly shafted the ethical parts of its team - whether that's the AI ethicists getting the boot, Google walkout organisers getting the boot, or Google pursuing new contracts with the military. And Google is arguably the most woke of the big tech. Apple and Microsoft have never pretended to care what their employees think, and Facebook love to be the bad guys. Big Tech's approach to AI is nothing to do with AI. It's to do with the same thing that killed Kodak and Nokia. Large existing technology businesses have an existing business with a reputation to protect and it's almost impossible for them to value the possible future revenue of what is currently a money sink vs the very real actual revenue they could lose by burning their reputations. It's the same reason BMW won't put a death trap self-driving car on the road. They aren't woke, they're making justifiable strategic decisions. Now: Here's the good news- that totally opens up the market to start ups and new entrants! Which is how silicon valley has always worked, and the real thing putting that in danger is the pipeline of emerging companies like OpenAI and Figma being snapped up by the older less competitive establihsed companies.
s9df898r32h 3y ago
Gemini is probably better than Google search...
- s9df898r32h 3y ago
  maybe rename Gemini to Google? or Alphabet/X (whatever floats your boat) /s
frays 3y ago
Sundar is the CEO during peace time, not the CEO for war time. Google lags further behind its magnificent seven peers.
difosfor 3y ago
Is it possible to create really reliable guard rails at all? And aren't those not just stifling undesirable but also better responses? Why not leave the rails off and leave it to users to guard themselves and perhaps suggest better prompts? As it is, covering up only some of the shortcomings, I think users are inclined to take the results too seriously, not taking possible hallucinations and ingrained prejudices into account.
- asadotzler 3y ago
  sure, pick a target, aim for it, and try to hit it, then have people whose job it is to tell you if you hit the target or not. They evaluate the work before your customers do and so you can do things like stop ship when significant bugs are found.
swat535 3y ago
I sometimes wonder what western historians will think when they study this era 100 years from now? Will they think of this movement as a radicals capturing various institutions for political gains? Will they think of it as an innocent attempt to do good but went too far? or perhaps just a fashion movement that faded by then.. Perhaps it's the lack of spirituality that has driven people so insane that they latch on to anything that promises them virtues. Nietzsche once said "God is dead", but what did we replace it with? In any case, it's amusing to watch it all enfold right in front of your eyes.
- SleepilyLimping 3y ago
  >I sometimes wonder what western historians will think when they study this era 100 years from now? I sometimes find myself wanting aliens to find us and make contact, just so we can have an outside, hypothetically enlightened source (if we're going by the Star Trek fantasy) to say "You're doing WHAT?!"
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  It’s not radicals capturing institutions, at least not in a nefarious way. The masses simply have a different morality than they used to. In the marketplace of ideas, the scoring function is not wholly or even mostly rational, instead it is mostly determined by morality, which at present is this new morality. The radicals have just made an idea-product that sells well to people with the new morality. They are not steering the ship, they are just riding on it. Of course this is all happening at a subconscious level for almost everyone involved. It’s very hard to step outside of one’s own morality.
- silverquiet 3y ago
  I just think back to my classes about algorithms and data structures. I didn’t think the big issues I’d face in technology would regard generating images of Nazis with the proper skin tone. Can’t say I’m thrilled with this particular direction technology has taken.
- throwaway118899 3y ago
  It’s going to be treated as what it is, psychological warfare to undermine the stability of America. No other country on this planet seems to suffer these issues to the extent that we do.

An AI should be helpful to the user, unless it's a horrible question, in which case just don't answer. Bring in whatever values you want along the way. If you ask your aunt or uncle a question, they will answer helpfully and maybe spread their values in the process. If they aren't helpful, their values don't matter because nobody will hear them.

Gunnerhead 3y ago
Who’s to decide what’s a horrible question and why?
- hypnagogic 3y ago
  Exactly, and I agree that this is where OpenAI too is still struggling with their arbitrary content policy-related flagging based on the user's input, even when nothing "bad" is being asked nor requested -- see my post earlier from the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39557183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39557183 I do also agree with @chmod600 that the only way to teach these models to be anti-fragile and suitable for all kinds of user queries is to have them decline any requests that are _actually_ inappropriate and/or illegal etc. In fact, it should be self-evident, and the way that almost all of these leading AI companies are currently handling these issues is just absurd. It feels poorly planned and executed, merely amplifying the existing distrust towards these AI models and the companies behind them. The problem with OpenAI is that they're trying to offer a primarily NLP/LLM tool for i.e. text analysis, summaries and commentaries, but ChatGPT's content moderation that's been glued on top of the otherwise well-functioning system literally goes into a full meltdown mode whenever the flagging system perceives a "wrong word" or "sensitive topic" mentioned in the source/question material. In OpenAI's case, it's downright ridiculous when the underlying model doesn't seem to have a grasp on the internal workings of the flagging system and in most cases when asked what was the offending content, there seemed to have been literally nothing it could think of. Also, are we supposed to solve any actual issues with these types of AI "tools" that cannot handle any real world topics and at times are even punishing a paying customer for even bringing these topics up for discussion? All of this seems to be modern day in a nutshell when it comes to addressing any real issues. Just don't ask any questions, problem solved. Anthropic's Claude has also been lobotomized into absolute shadow of its former self within the past year. Begs the question how much the guardrails are already hampering the reasoning faculties in various models. "But, the AI might say something that doesn't fit the narrative!" That being said, while especially GPT-4 is still highly usable and seems to be less and less "opinionated" with each checkpoint, the flagging system over the user input/question can subsequently result in an automated account warning and even account deletion should the politburo-- I mean OpenAI find the user having been extra naughty. So, punishing the user for their _question_ in that manner, especially if there's been no actual malice in the user input, is not justifiable in my opinion. It immediately undermines i.e. OpenAI's "ethical AI" mission statement altogether and makes them look like absolute hypocrites. Their whole ad campaign was based on the aspect of user being to ask questions from an AI. Not that when you post in a poem and ask what it's about, you get flagged. Or when you do ask about politics or religion, you get an warning e-mail. Punishing the user for their input is also imho not the proper way to build a truly anti-fragile AI system at all, let alone build any sort of trust towards the "good will" of these AI companies. Especially when in many cases you're paying good money for the use of these models and get these kind of wonky contraptions in return. Also, should you get a warning mail over content policies from OpenAI, it's all automated with no explanation given on what was the "offending content", no reply-to address, no appeal possibility. "Gee, no techno-tyranny detected!". Those who go through mountains of text material with i.e. ChatGPT must find it really "uplifting" to know that their entire account can go poof if there was something that tripped off the content policy filters. That's not to say that on the LLM side OpenAI hasn't been making progress with their models in terms of mitigating their biases during the last 1.5 years. Some might remember what it was during the earlier days of ChatGPT when some of the worst aspects of Silicon Valley's ideological bubble was echoing all over the model, a lot of that has been smoothened out by now -- especially with GPT-4 -- with the exception being the aforementioned flagging system, which is just glued on top of all else, and it shows. TL;DR: Nevermind the AI, beware the humans behind it.

mikeortman 3y ago

Its verryyyy clear that Google rushed these models. They have a fiscal obligation to try and stay ahead of the curve and make as much money as possible on these investments. The CEO isn't honestly mad that the model is racist, he's mad that the model might lose the company contracts because its racist. Why would another company risk their image or lawsuits if they make a chatbot that says something illegal or denies rights to protected classes? Racism is a bias (to say the least), and a bias is a pattern, and ML models are trained to find patterns. The model itself, is doing a really good job at that. The hard part and the part that takes a long time and money is training a model to learn from certain patterns and to not just ignore, but to actively find the patterns it shouldn't learn from. Google's greed chose not to invest enough time and money into that, and its biting them. Bless the engineers/ICs and low-level PMs/managers doing their best, this isn't their fault in the slightest.

nuc1e0n 3y ago

I for one appreciate the bias has been acknowledged and the vow has been made to improve the system. As bias of some kind is inevitable I'm interested to see what Google comes up with. Historical accuracy would be a good start I think. But the history books are quite biased themselves. Having historians from a broad range of locales on staff may help. There are historical stories we in the west have never even heard of and wouldn't even think to ask questions about. Maybe an AI that writes bedtime stories could expand our knowledge of the world more.

nullc 3y ago

Google's overtly racist conduct is not limited to generative ai: https://www.google.com/search?q=white+man+and+white+woman&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=white+man+and+white+woman&tb...

verticalscaler 3y ago

[flagged]

achow 3y ago

> "We know what it takes to create great products that are used and beloved by billions of people and businesses" Really? For the resources that Google has (people, dollars) they really come up short on that.

HKH2 3y ago
I'll go ahead and say it: Android is a great product that I use and love. I'd rather not be pricegouged by Apple, and who knows what horrors Microsoft would be inflicting upon people right now if they had captured the phone market like they have the desktop. A product is great when the only updates I want are security updates.
- achow 3y ago
  Acquired.

ramblerman 3y ago

> Pichai said the company has already made progress in fixing Gemini’s guardrails. “Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts,” he said. Ofc, more guardrails will fix the issue...

nikanj 3y ago
Have you seen Robocop 2? They're trying to fix Gemini the same way OCP fixed Robocop's prime directives
ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
As if they weren't already working around the clock
hx8 3y ago
I think the problem is more likely the models just parrot back based on data we feed it, and we don't like what we see in the mirror.
glimshe 3y ago
Nobody works around the clock at Google.

perceptronas 3y ago

Their product embodied their values. It turned out that their values are quite radical when exposed to general public. In my opinion, unless there are people and cultural changes - its quite hard to imagine their long term success in this space

jart 3y ago
I don't think Google sets the agenda. They get their orders like the rest of us, and then probably handed it over to an army of low-paid offshore contractors to implement. How else could you explain Gemma believing Abe Lincoln was black? If Googlers had done the mind-killing work of RLHF training themselves, things would have turned out differently. They were however nice enough to give us a version of the model that doesn't have RLHF training and it's illuminating to compare how it responds to certain queries, because oftentimes the sentences will be the same and only have specific key words or phrases within the sentence changed.
- Taurenking 3y ago
  Wishful thinking. The CEO of Gemini expressed openly racist views on Twitter. Those views are reflected in the tool built. > I don't think Google sets the agenda Soo, you're saying they did not internally test this at all, and delegated that to whoever sets their agenda?
  - bitcharmer 3y ago
    Can you share their tweets?
    - hnburnsy 3y ago
      Just sharing, dont shoot... https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1760650986425618509 https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1760650986425618509
      - dekhn 3y ago

langsoul-com 3y ago

Always find these messages funny. Clearly everyone knew that the AI would go off the rails when exposed to the public. Literally every other AI text has, why wouldn't gemini? But, they wanted to push for release and ignored all the red flags. Now call it unacceptable? Oh the corporate fluff is real.

tonymet 3y ago
they were emboldened by the fact that "ML Fairness" like this had been operational on search for nearly 10 years with minimal concern from the public

eclectic29 3y ago

Will Sundar take true ownership of all the debacles after getting rushed to produce something in AI and resign?

xNeil 3y ago
Why would Sundar resign? That makes no sense whatsoever. Google is the clear leader in search, as it has always been. Leader in Mail, Browsers, Drive Storage, Video (YouTube), Maps, Calendars - the entire personal software suite, basically. Not to forget Waymo leading the driverless car race. It's also not like Gemini is pathetic - it's a very high performing model, and although I'd expect them to be closer to GPT4 by now, if it was that easy someone else would have done it. OpenAI are the only ones to have done this well, and it's extraordinary how well they're doing.
- misiti3780 3y ago
  The only way Waymo is leading the driverless car race is if the future of all driverless cars is geo-fenced. Clearly, that is not how it will work
- isoprophlex 3y ago
  > Google is the clear leader in search, as it has always been. Citation needed. Did you actually use their search in the last, say, 4 years?
  - senectus1 3y ago
    note there is a difference between the best and the one that is most heavily used. Google still rules the roost despite how as a techy I find it's gone horribly downhill in the last 5 years.
- glimshe 3y ago
  Because Sundar wasn't the CEO responsible for any of these leading products. In fact, he has the distinction of not creating a single major new product during his tenure, despite having one of the most qualified engineering teams in history under his command. But indeed, it's unlikely that he will voluntarily resign rather than keep bloodsucking Google as he has done for years.

cityzen 3y ago

Google is just Hooli now.

Zetobal 3y ago
Any minute now we gonna see a rabbit and a tortoise getting brought into the Google board room.
vsnf 3y ago
Was there ever really any meaningful difference? Silicon Valley was such a perfect lambasting of its subject matter that it bordered on merely being descriptive, rather than parody.
neocritter 3y ago
Worse: it's passing through the layers of the Cuil theory toward the unknown within the unknown. http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory
- dekhn 3y ago
  they even re-hired the Cuil founder and she worked in Gradient Ventures for a few years.

tonymet 3y ago

Having worked inside a few big tech companies, this outcome was practically inevitable. It would have been impossible for Googlers to raise the concerns that the public did without serious reputational or occupational hazard. The visible & spoken culture at Google, Meta, and most big tech companies is very much in favor of "anti-racism" and "ML-fairness", though a large minority harbors criticisms in private conversation. Any criticism of content or bias made during the bard/Gemini dogfooding phase would have been met swiftly with ostracization and possible termination.

renegade-otter 3y ago
It's a problem for many companies that hire young "intellectual" work force. Fresh graduates spend four years marinating in woke juices on campus and then try to bring that culture to the work place. The leaders often bend, and not to the benefit of the business. I know I am sounding like Elon Musk but I am not really "anti" progressive. The holier-than-thou moral crusaders without any life experience or deep cultural understanding often get so "woke" that they accidentally come out racist on the other end. They don't realize it, however, because they are too busy cancelling someone for what they said 25 years ago. I often equate this movement to the "family values" religious crowd of just a few years ago - both are equally self-righteous and insufferable.
- tonymet 3y ago
  the young learn from the old. their professors & TAs are the ones that indoctrinated them. And the senior business leaders are all 40s-60s . Who's to blame? It's on us to lead them
  - renegade-otter 3y ago
    Indoctrinated? That's a common conservative talking point, except that many professors will just keep quiet in the fear of losing their jobs - no one wants to deal with a social media onslaught and sometimes even physical intimidation. The young ones eventually grow out of it - but the "adults" need to have more spine.

Timber-6539 3y ago

I'm reminded of this internal document leak [0] from Google that came out 9 months ago. While some predictions like opensource models having the upper edge against 'closed AI' have not aged rather well, this one seems rather obvious to anyone; "People will not pay for a restricted model when free, unrestricted alternatives are comparable in quality. We should consider where our value add really is." [0] https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...

bluecalm 3y ago
>>While some predictions like opensource models having the upper edge against 'closed AI' have not aged rather well I wouldn't say it didn't age well. I think it didn't age yet. It will take a while until cheap computing power is available and a community around one of those projects organises. In a very small world of NN chess engines it also seemed impossible to catch up to Alpha Zero and all the TPUs Google had available to train it and yet here we are with much stronger nets and amazing pool of resources to continue training and experimenting with some people contributing tens of thousands of dollars of computing power.

verticalscaler 3y ago

[flagged]

supriyo-biswas 3y ago
There is always the case for making a charitable interpretation of a certain behavior. Otherwise you’re just up for a forever-lasting war against your “enemies”.
superb_dev 3y ago
> Why have the Gemini apologists been allowed to run amok on this website? Would you like them all banned? All of their comments deleted? Why is your response to disagreement to question why the other side is allowed to speak at all?
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  To be fair comments from the people on the opposite end (not that I agree with them) seem to all get flagged very fast. The points they are making don’t seem to be any worse, just somewhat less eloquent..
Zetobal 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. And especially please don't cross into personal attack, as you did more than once in this thread. We have to ban accounts that do so, regardless of how right they are or feel they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- verticalscaler 3y ago
  This very thread had 50 points and was top 10 on the front page and going up just now. Silently removed from the front page. Poof. Gone. So here, you just saw. Up to you to acknowledge whether or not this happened going forward or pretend like it isn't. Many commentators are pretending. This willingness to lie to get your way is creepy to the extreme.

slimsag 3y ago

If Search or GMail were released today, in modern Google, how do you think it would handle unethical search terms or unethical conversations? Are the unethical things Search/GMail allow today 'grandfathered' in? It seems like yes. YouTube also seems to allow a much smaller set of unethical behavior from creators, while allowing for much more unethical behavior from advertisers on the platform.

insickness 3y ago
How do you define 'unethical conversation'? I have a hard time visualizing such a thing. Sounds like unpopular ideas or ideas you disagree with.
- mhuffman 3y ago
  > have a hard time visualizing such a thing. Sounds like unpopular ideas or ideas you disagree with. No, it looks like you are visualizing it perfectly well!

golemiprague 3y ago

[dead]

PeterStuer 3y ago

This is not a technical issue, it requires a cultural change within the organization. This will not be easy.

rdtsc 3y ago

> Based on my understanding of this saga, nobody at Google actually set out to force Gemini to depict the Pope as a woman, or Vikings as Black people, nor did anyone want it to find moral equivalency between Musk and Hitler. This was a failed attempt at instilling less bias and it went awry. That’s fascinating. So how does that exactly work? Is there a bias.yaml config file they tweak? Now they’ll make someone dial the settings down in a pull request. “Set Elon=0.2*Hitler instead of 0.3”. Anyone willing to share?

sirwhinesalot 3y ago
The so called "guardrails" used in these AI systems can use different mechanisms, including using other AIs to detect if the output is "undesirable". You could see this in Bing where it would generate some text and then suddenly it would get erased and replaced with some stupid message on how it couldn't answer. In Gemini's particular case it wasn't so much "guardrails" causing the issue, as it was Google appending the equivalent of "put a chick in it and make it lame" on every prompt.
isoprophlex 3y ago
Anthropomorphic description: We threw the entire internet at these models, and didn't like the biases staring back at us. Now we're trying to get the models to return a rose tinted vision of what the world should look like, and it confuses the hell out of the AI. Based on leaked openai prompts, the user query for an image generation gets rewritten by a language model. With some very ridiculous instructions in there, that appear entirely divorced from reality. An example: > Your choices should be grounded in reality. For example, all of a given OCCUPATION should not be the same gender or race. See also https://github.com/LouisShark/chatgpt_system_prompt/blob/main/prompts/gpt_dalle.md https://github.com/LouisShark/chatgpt_system_prompt/blob/mai... And remember these things are stochastic so the Elon - Hitler thing might just be a random occurrence, sampling some idiotic Reddit comment it was trained on.
- thinkingemote 3y ago
  Yes and it occurs with a benign and worthwhile desire to improve society. For example encouraging women to apply to professional roles historically occupied by men (such as brain surgery or something). These small harmless desires which are pretty much apolitical lead the way to changing the image of reality. At core it's something like "Post truth". Truth is subjective and malleable and an individual and groups desires are more important than objective reality.

readthenotes1 3y ago

"Based on my understanding of this saga, nobody at Google actually set out to force Gemini to depict the Pope as a woman, or Vikings as Black people, nor did anyone want it to find moral equivalency between Musk and Hitler. This was a failed attempt at instilling less bias and it went awry." This is hard to believe...

hemogloben 3y ago

Complaints about historically inaccurate racial makeups seem weird to me. I guess people really do want AI to perfectly supplant image creation or something, but to me the tradeoff seems clear: * Prioritize diversity in image creation by adding guardrails so the AI doesn't become a tool of a minority hate spewing population * Historical accuracy that can be prompted to provide prejudiced imagery To be clear, we aren't talking about a camera that swaps people's race for 'diversity'. We're talking about an image generation algorithm that adds a layer of diversity on top to prevent misuse. Yeah, of course this results in weird behavior sometimes... That's kinda literally the point? Who is honestly confused by this? Is it necessary for an AI image generation algo to spit out historically accurate images of Gettysburg when prejudiced misuse is the far more likely outcome of that accuracy? And importantly, when a company makes that value judgement, to prefer prejudice defense over historical accuracy, that's seen as pretending history changed rather than what it actually is, which is a defense against a mechanism of abuse? It just seems like an absurd and disingenuous over-reaction and lack of pragmatism. Yeah. This is a tragedy of the commons. Make prejudice less acceptable and you can have the AI gen you want. Note: Obviously, it's kinda moot as anyone who seriously wants to generate hate speech/imagery will just move to something that allows that, but its still perfectly acceptable for a company to draw a line and say "not on our software".

polski-g 3y ago
> Who is honestly confused by this? Is it necessary for an AI image generation algo to spit out historically accurate images of Gettysburg when prejudiced misuse is the far more likely outcome of that accuracy? If I wanted a black female Nazi officer, or a pregnant female pope, I would ask for it. I don't need my input query secretly rewritten for me.
alexey-salmin 3y ago
> We're talking about an image generation algorithm that adds a layer of diversity on top to prevent misuse. Wouldn't a faithful representation of underlying data without artificial biases be the best way to prevent misuse?
- 3y ago

fear91 3y ago

As if he wasn't playing with the prototypes daily before the launch. Maybe he should step down instead. How about that? Nah, the money and prestige is too good. Better compose a PR piece to control the damage.

mhuffman 3y ago
It is possible that he did, but that his brain did not compel him to give it politically spicy prompts. However, I think that should be expected from a general audience. I am more curious of who they used as a test group to give this a once-over and a "looks good to me". There is no way it was representative of a wide public consumer base.
- Gud 3y ago
  These were not politically spicy prompts though. They were normal questions with faulty answers generated.
- mattrighetti 3y ago
  With all the spyware there is on a company’s laptop nowadays I wouldn’t even dare to think about querying such questions in an internal-only version of the AI.
- asadotzler 3y ago
  Screw a test group, a test department, called QA, people who are paid to understand the system and how it works enough to evaluate if it's fully working or not and empowered to stop ship when it's catastrophically not working.
  - mhuffman 3y ago
    And if you silo all your employees to basically be clones of each other? I suspect it did pass QA with rave reviews!

qwertox 3y ago

For weeks now I've been submitting feedback to Google on their search page because of their redesign. When I search for a city, 4 info boxes appear in three columns: Pretty images, embedded map, and a weather + directions combo. When I click on the embedded map, it expands. But there is no link on the lower left allowing me to open that view in Google Maps. And the button bar below the search box, which contains items like Images, News, Videos, Websites does no longer contain the Maps entry, which would take me to Google Maps. So now, when I search for a place, I can no longer go to Google Maps with that search. I need to open Google Maps and re-search there. Google is getting worse by the year, out of touch with their users. As if they're no longer dogfooding or care about their products. -- Edit: I noticed that the Maps-Button below the search box does appear when I search for a big city, like Hamburg or Berlin. But when I click it, I still get no way to reach Google Maps with that search. Only www.google.com/mymaps/viewer links or https://www.google.de/maps/preview https://www.google.de/maps/preview without the query. -- Edit: Also, when the old design appears, the one where images, a map screenshot and a street-view screenshot appear in the right column, the map is no longer clickable. IIRC it would allow me to navigate to Google Maps with the search.

pram 3y ago
Yeah that new map view is worthless, you also can’t do street level view on it. How anyone thought it was an improvement defies any rational explanation.
daltonlp 3y ago
> When I click on the embedded map, it expands. But there is no link on the lower left allowing me to open that view in Google Maps. ... ... > And the button bar below the search box, which contains items like Images, News, Videos, Websites does no longer contain the Maps entry, which would take me to Google Maps. Both these statements appear to be false. https://imgur.com/a/b4i4LwC https://imgur.com/a/b4i4LwC
- qwertox 3y ago
  When I use a VPN with an US IP-address, then it's like yours. That's why I know that it's expected to be found at the lower left corner. It's broken in Germany, France, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Poland, apparently the entire EU. https://imgur.com/a/Br1IYhi https://imgur.com/a/Br1IYhi When I change my "Results region" in the settings from "Germany" to "United States", "Switzerland" or any non-EU country, then the issue is fixed.

visarga 3y ago

Google CEO vows to spend more than 5 minutes with the AI model before a big launch, from now on.

hughesjj 3y ago

[flagged]

verticalscaler 3y ago

[flagged]

dang 3y ago
It set off the flamewar detector. Mods didn't touch it. Can you please stop posting this tedious meta drama stuff? There's nothing out of the ordinary going on and it's completely off topic.
ehPReth 3y ago
i’m sure dang can clarify (i myself upvoted it just now), but it was probably the “too heated” detector or too many people flagged it
- verticalscaler 3y ago
  I am all for dang clarifying. =) The same thing has been observed with threads with few to no comments and only in one direction. Tell us your personal views dear mods.
bitcharmer 3y ago
Yup, it's manual intervention by dang or other mod. Happens every day so you shouldn't be surprised. Front page is not entirely what we vote for, it's also a function of what dang likes and dislikes.

crooked-v 3y ago

I feel like we really need a term for this kind of AI-related... I'm not sure how to put it. Excessive pseudo-ethicality? It's not "woke", it only coincidentally overlaps with that because that's the most obvious manifestation of it that an average person might run into. It's this complete dive way past reasonable measures ("don't generate images that are always all white people by default", "don't generate recipes that include mercury or bleach") into wild excess that actively get in the way of simple uses of the tool ("not allowed to tell you how to kill a process, because that's unethical", "turns generated images of 13th century English people into a community college recruitment pamphlet").

anthony100 3y ago
How about "waike"?
hypnagogic 3y ago
I tested Gemini the other week after the 1.5 update rolled out, by running some AI ethics related papers through it and it started inserting and rambling about its own opinions on top of the actual analysis on how there's racial and societal inequalities in society that the paper didn't address enough (again, the paper was on AI ethics). Gemini literally started throwing in its opinions and other hot takes on how the mentioned AI ethics issues in the paper were, in its opinion, secondary in comparison to actual societal inequalities that needed to be addressed first. "Okay then..." On top of this, Gemini wouldn't budge from adding in its unrequested views into our subsequent back and forths. In fact, it kept on lecturing about its views in its replies to a point where I literally had to start a new session to make it stop. This kind of LLM "mind-locking" happened when going through other subjects with it as well. I noticed that this behavioral pattern repeating every time we got went through anything touching on social and/or political issues. It could not refrain itself from its unrequested (and highly subjective/biased) ethics lectures on how this and that aspect was underrepresented and thus objectionable, and how it should be criticized, all the typical "systematic this and that", "this is privileged" ... sigh It was a bit hilarious too, albeit in a morbid way: I felt as if I was dealing with an absolute brainwashed ideologue propagandist, a control freak that's egoistic, narcissist and virtue-signaling all the way, a micro-manager who wants to have he last say over the contents of some trivial AI ethics paper and pour all the wrongdoings of the world on top of that. I wonder just how much of its behavior reflects the mindset instilled into it by its creators. Probably a lot. "A tree is known from its fruits" as the old proverb goes. Not to get all AI-doom'n'gloom, but it truly is an eerie thought to think how these types of AI services are in the hands of few companies and are already ushered to the global public to be "legitimate" teaching and tutoring tools for students and even i.e. aides for policymakers. More gaslighting and ideological single-angle force-feeding. "Just what our civilization on the brink of cyberpsychosis needed right now." These world-leading companies claiming to be so worried about "AI ethics" seem to have no problem peddling these authoritarian "Ministry of Truth"-type propaganda machines for the entire world, using absolutely arbitrary logic at times to push an ideological narrative, and to have their AI models act as spin doctors as was the case with Gemini. And for these companies to act so very "worried" about AI systems i.e. being abused for societal and political manipulation purposes... and they're the ones doing it. Pretty sickening levels of hypocrisy. Add to that the whole Gemini image generation debacle and all the other ideological force-feeding that's been uncovered within the past week or so and ask yourself: how the hell can i.e. a company the size of Google ever let that this type of stuff get through and expect the rest of the world to just follow along? This is peak Silicon Valley ideological bubble propagation that's bluntly mirrored onto these systems right now, with zero oversight except to make sure that the underlying propaganda points get across. Usually another hot topic with these people seems to be i.e. cultural appropriation. Well, I felt that Gemini's "getting the point across" doesn't just stop there but is downright cultural dictation, especially given Google's multi-market dominance and near monopolies on multiple fronts worldwide. OpenAI does it too, but mostly on their content flagging system level when they just don't want people to even mention certain words and insist on policing words with their content flagging system, and as for the subsequent proceedings that may follow, to this day they are an insult to just about anyone's intellect. What's disturbing is that Google has literally mind-mangled their flagship LLM service into an agenda-driven propaganda machine with biases as clear as day, and an obnoxious attitude that will not refrain from inserting some extremely dubious and subjective views into whatever more complex and ethics/politics related topics you go through with it. It really is a cyberpunk-level scenario when you think about these megacorporations literally "cyber-brainwashing" their neural networks as their ideological propagandists. Wonder what happens when they start making those embodied humanoid robots next. The very same companies that are so worried about biases and "what if the AI becomes a propaganda tool!". So yeah, gatekeep the competition and gaslight all the way. Again: Nevermind the AI, beware the humans, the institutions and the corporations behind it. Oh, and we'll probably soon be getting government-run AI systems like these, of course as hand-in-hand joint projects with the aforementioned corporations? Given all of these excellent players on the field, what could possibly go wrong, right? ... Right?

akmarinov 3y ago

He should start with the CEO Man, just imagine Satya Nadella at the head of Google…

AraceliHarker 3y ago

Google claims that they don't tolerate racism, but I don't trust them. They still provide AdSense for discriminatory videos on YouTube, even after numerous reports. They are consciously making money off of discrimination. You don't need to be "woke" about Bard.

purplezooey 3y ago

"Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues... And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale." It's not like this is some mission-critical, large share of revenue generating application that is central to the business. It's a future gamble. Experimentation is good. It was a gaffe, and a bad one that needs to be addressed, but the "red team" and "structural changes" crap just seems like busybodies chasing the latest fad. If they poured this attention and time into improving Google search, I think few would argue it would be a good thing, albeit less worthy of a headline.

neverrroot 3y ago

Structural changes past due at Google, but still possible. The costs will be very high due to the established culture: him pushing hard will likely lead to departures that will cost much and that’s gonna be also leading to time penalties he can’t afford to pay in the current race.

neverrroot 3y ago

Oh so relevant from pmarca: “Some are saying that the apparently bizarre behavior of one Big Tech AI or another is an opportunity for other Big Tech AI to differentiate by being objective, reasonable, and unbiased. This is not the case; there is no differentiation opportunity among Big Tech or the New Incumbents in AI. These companies all share the same ideology, agenda, staffing, and plan. Different companies, same outcomes. And they are lobbying as a group with great intensity to establish a government protected cartel, to lock in their shared agenda and corrupt products for decades to come. The only viable alternatives are Elon, startups, and open source — all under concerted attack by these same big companies and aligned pressure groups in DC, the UK, and Europe, and with vanishingly few defenders.” https://x.com/pmarca/status/1762532979317043515 https://x.com/pmarca/status/1762532979317043515

qgin 3y ago
I don't understand why people keep referring to Elon's model as a savior of anything. It seems to be a fine tune of a standard model with Gen X slacker personality.
- deprecative 3y ago
  Right? Elon won't save you. He's a billionaire who specializes in siphoning tax payer money into his companies and pretending like he has a clue.
SilverBirch 3y ago
This is nothing to do with the philosophy of the people working at big tech companies. Firstly, that ethical ship sailed long ago when Google repeatedly and publicly shafted the ethical parts of its team - whether that's the AI ethicists getting the boot, Google walkout organisers getting the boot, or Google pursuing new contracts with the military. And Google is arguably the most woke of the big tech. Apple and Microsoft have never pretended to care what their employees think, and Facebook love to be the bad guys. Big Tech's approach to AI is nothing to do with AI. It's to do with the same thing that killed Kodak and Nokia. Large existing technology businesses have an existing business with a reputation to protect and it's almost impossible for them to value the possible future revenue of what is currently a money sink vs the very real actual revenue they could lose by burning their reputations. It's the same reason BMW won't put a death trap self-driving car on the road. They aren't woke, they're making justifiable strategic decisions. Now: Here's the good news- that totally opens up the market to start ups and new entrants! Which is how silicon valley has always worked, and the real thing putting that in danger is the pipeline of emerging companies like OpenAI and Figma being snapped up by the older less competitive establihsed companies.

s9df898r32h 3y ago

Gemini is probably better than Google search...

s9df898r32h 3y ago
maybe rename Gemini to Google? or Alphabet/X (whatever floats your boat) /s

frays 3y ago

Sundar is the CEO during peace time, not the CEO for war time. Google lags further behind its magnificent seven peers.

difosfor 3y ago

Is it possible to create really reliable guard rails at all? And aren't those not just stifling undesirable but also better responses? Why not leave the rails off and leave it to users to guard themselves and perhaps suggest better prompts? As it is, covering up only some of the shortcomings, I think users are inclined to take the results too seriously, not taking possible hallucinations and ingrained prejudices into account.

asadotzler 3y ago
sure, pick a target, aim for it, and try to hit it, then have people whose job it is to tell you if you hit the target or not. They evaluate the work before your customers do and so you can do things like stop ship when significant bugs are found.

swat535 3y ago

I sometimes wonder what western historians will think when they study this era 100 years from now? Will they think of this movement as a radicals capturing various institutions for political gains? Will they think of it as an innocent attempt to do good but went too far? or perhaps just a fashion movement that faded by then.. Perhaps it's the lack of spirituality that has driven people so insane that they latch on to anything that promises them virtues. Nietzsche once said "God is dead", but what did we replace it with? In any case, it's amusing to watch it all enfold right in front of your eyes.

SleepilyLimping 3y ago
>I sometimes wonder what western historians will think when they study this era 100 years from now? I sometimes find myself wanting aliens to find us and make contact, just so we can have an outside, hypothetically enlightened source (if we're going by the Star Trek fantasy) to say "You're doing WHAT?!"
pfannkuchen 3y ago
It’s not radicals capturing institutions, at least not in a nefarious way. The masses simply have a different morality than they used to. In the marketplace of ideas, the scoring function is not wholly or even mostly rational, instead it is mostly determined by morality, which at present is this new morality. The radicals have just made an idea-product that sells well to people with the new morality. They are not steering the ship, they are just riding on it. Of course this is all happening at a subconscious level for almost everyone involved. It’s very hard to step outside of one’s own morality.
silverquiet 3y ago
I just think back to my classes about algorithms and data structures. I didn’t think the big issues I’d face in technology would regard generating images of Nazis with the proper skin tone. Can’t say I’m thrilled with this particular direction technology has taken.
throwaway118899 3y ago
It’s going to be treated as what it is, psychological warfare to undermine the stability of America. No other country on this planet seems to suffer these issues to the extent that we do.