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Sergey Brin says in rare appearance that company 'messed up' Gemini image launch
- speeder 3y agoSergey Brin and others at Google are still ignoring that TEXT generation is equally messed up with Gemini. The problem is not image generation, is the entire thing.
- mupuff1234 3y agoIsn't that ignoring the fact that all LLMs today suffers from multiple quality issues? This isn't really specific to Gemini.
- spacebanana7 3y agoGemini's aggression around health & safety, politics, malware etc seem to be much stronger than those of OpenAI/Meta/Mistral
- WalterSear 3y agoGoogle, in general, seems to have stepped up it's hostility to it's users of late.
- sva_ 3y agoI think they are referring to alleged political biases that are instilled in the model through RLHF.
- joemazerino 3y agoAlleged? Did you not see the pictures of black female founding fathers?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tehwebguy 3y agoLot of extremely normal people being radicalized by shitty software in here.
- liveoneggs 3y agoIn the linked article Sergey literally says > "it leans left in many cases"
- tehwebguy 3y agoIs this the actual smoking gun, “many”?
- pquki4 3y agoYes all LLMs have problems. But some are better than others, and there are benchmarks used for comparing the models. Also, in terms of PR, I don't remember OpenAI having messed up like this -- having one really bad incident is worse than not giving perfect answers.
- mfrc 3y agoOpenAI doesn't have image generation in the free version of its product.
- ionwake 3y agoI cancelled my sub to Gemini. It is aggressive against the user. The “insert an ethnic minority into every group photo” was the straw that broke the camels back as it was clearly biased.( for anyone who cares I am an ethnic minority). But I do remember, and I mean this, my first ever query asking it to draw a picture by a Japanese artist resulted in a “call this number for mental health problems” I was like wtf. The prompt was benign “water color sunbathing beach sunset” by some random normal Japanese artist. Sure potentially nsfw but the reply was completely hamfisted, insulting and really crazy. I probably wouldn’t have cared but it was literally my first prompt. Before anyone says “well it could have been degenerate” you have heard of the Michelangelo David right? The greatest ever sculpture? I haven’t tried but I’m pretty sure there isn’t a hope in hell the llm would reproduce anything like it. Really went off it since day one.
- WalterSear 3y agoI've found it impossible to tell if it has any quality issues, because it only gives me non-answers, wrapped in disclaimers.
- carlmr 3y agoEspecially true for Copilot. I almost never get anything useful out of it. It's too restrictive.
- leosanchez 3y agoGitHub copilot ?
- carlmr 3y agoBing copilot
- rm_-rf_slash 3y agoAll LLMs will always have multiple quality issues. A tool that complex can never be perfect. FWIW GPT-4 via API has treated me well, more consistently than ChatGPT. Would be nice if they solved the issues with Assistants but that’s another matter…
- ionwake 3y agoDoes the chatgpt give better results than the front end ?
- chaostheory 3y agoVanilla, non-binged ChatGPT is flawed, but not nearly as annoying as everything else like Claude, Pi, and Gemini
- bmitc 3y agoLike you say, I think what's being discovered is the lack of utility in these things. These techbro companies with Gemini, ChatGPT, etc. are just rediscovering that human to human communication is hard and cannot be automated and that human illustrators, artists, animators, writers, etc. have real, actualizable value. And it's rediscovering that we suck at prompting even humans, much less systems that have no idea what they're doing and just statistically stitch and glue data together. These LLMs are just exposing that humans are fairly bad at communication and they are encoding that into automated systems.
- liveoneggs 3y agoGemini is just following google images, I think - The classic (2015-ish discovery) - "american inventors" google image search still appears to silently replace "american" with "african american" The main serp page appears to have stopped doing it.
- christkv 3y agoThats disturbing even happens when searching from Europe so its a global manipulation of results. At this point I have started to tell everyone i know to avoid google products. The question is any of the other search engines any better ?
- rm_-rf_slash 3y agoI use DuckDuckGo primarily and hear good things about Kagi on HN, but haven’t used it much myself. DDG is fine I suppose, although my most frequent use case of looking up (nearly wrote “googling”) code solutions is mostly handled by ChatGPT these days.
- christkv 3y agoI've started just running models locally for the most part. If I want an apple cake recipe written in the speech style of Stalin who is OpenAI to deny me.
- afp14 3y agoI like presearch.com wholly because they are too young/small to apply these sorts of filters, the results feel "raw" in a good way. I have no affiliation with them and dislike their cryptocurrency based snake oil. But as far as a search engine that hasn't been tinkered with and is free, not bad, and I recommend them on that basis alone.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- airstrike 3y agoSergey Brin and others at Google are still ignoring that GOOGLE is equally messed up as Gemini. The problem is not Gemini, it's Google.
- nunez 3y agoInterestingly, Kagi does the same thing. Though this raises a question for me. If searching "American inventors" threw down pages and pages of white people, would the Internet raise a stink about it? If it's anything like what happened to the female human computers that made the ENIAC and UNIVAC work, my bet is no. [0] [0]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-women-behind-eniac https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-women-behind-eniac? I only mentioned it because I read about it yesterday!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lupire 3y agoSorry, but who cares? He owns the company, but he isn't contributing or leading. He's just hanging around and poking a bit, making uniformed obvious comments.
- londons_explore 3y agoHis contribution is keeping an eye on leadership and kicking them out if they misstep.
- loudmax 3y agoIn that case, Sergey really needs to start kicking. From the outside, it seems that there is no leadership.
- WalterSear 3y agoExcept he hasn't. And they are.
- matwood 3y agoWell where has he been? Is he waiting for the 18th chat app to be green lighted before realizing they have a huge leadership issue?
- hackernoteng 3y agoWould not be shocked if he steps in as CEO
- mfrc 3y agoHe's never played a managerial role at the company. That was always Larry Page.
- karol 3y ago[flagged]
- bedhead 3y agoAbsentee landlord
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago„Over the last week, in communication with a flood of Googlers eager to speak on the issues facing their company — from management on almost every major product, to engineering, sales, trust and safety, publicity, and marketing — employees painted a far bleaker portrait of the company than is often reported: Google is a runaway, cash-printing search monopoly with no vision, no leadership, and, due to its incredibly siloed culture, no real sense of what is going on from team to team. The only thing connecting employees is a powerful, sprawling HR bureaucracy that, yes, is totally obsessed with left-wing political dogma. But the company’s zealots are only capable of thriving because no other fount of power asserts, or even attempts to assert, any kind of meaningful influence. The phrase “culture of fear” was used by almost everyone I spoke with, and not only to explain the dearth of resistance to the company’s craziest DEI excesses, but to explain the dearth of innovation from what might be the highest concentration of talented technologists in the world.“ https://x.com/piratewires/status/1764722509461807390 https://x.com/piratewires/status/1764722509461807390
- xqcgrek2 3y agoThe opinion or words of an absent figurehead have little weight. This is the equivalent of a someone who was a US president 40 years ago criticizing a current president.
- nonethewiser 3y agoPast presidents are one of the most informed commentators of current presidents.
- hackernoteng 3y agoNot a great analogy since Brin could step in as CEO unlike a past US president.
- yreg 3y agoThat's not at all the case, since Sergey holds 42% of B class shares. Together with Larry they have the majority voting control over Alphabet.
- unsupp0rted 3y ago> I think it was mostly due to just not thorough testing Really? I suspect the people who wanted it to be like that successfully tested that it was like that.
- kenjackson 3y agoI haven’t heard a single Google employee say they wanted it to be like that. Do you know who specifically did? It sounds like a conspiracy theory more than anything else.
- unsupp0rted 3y agoWhat would strain credulity is if Google released this, after 10s of thousands of highly-paid dev and PM hours, plus thousands of full-time tester hours, without having identified the problems the internet found within 60 seconds. Evidently (i.e. evidenced by what we got) Google’s testers tested only what they wanted to test.
- DebtDeflation 3y agoIt's been two weeks since Google turned off the generation of images with people. Still no word on when it's coming back. This tells me it wasn't just system prompts and prompt injection, it was done via RLHF and it's going to take awhile to un-gimp the model. I just tried "generate an image of a man camping in the woods" and it came back with "Sure, here is an image of a man camping in the woods" followed by a 10-15 second pause followed by "We are working to improve Gemini’s ability to generate images of people. We expect this feature to return soon and will notify you in release updates when it does." This would seem to indicate they're letting it generate an image and then running some sort of human detector on the output instead of filtering the prompt on the front end.
- mousetree 3y agoGiven the degree of the controversy, I think even if it was just simple fixes in system prompts, they would want to take a few weeks of testing and red teaming before re-releasing.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>they would want to take a few weeks of testing and red teaming before re-releasing. One wonders why they haven't done this kind of testing before going public with such an important feature of such an important new flagship product. It's not like the prompts were some super niche stuff that required a lot of imagination to conjure. And they could have blocked the people image generation feature from the start if they saw it malfunctioning like that in tests and didn't have enough time to fix it on such a short notice before launch. I find it hard to believe nobody internal at Google bothered to play with Gemini to generate people for shits and giggles and saw the hilarious wrong outputs and raise the alarm. Or they did ran tests, saw the issues but they decided internally that there's nothing wrong with those generated outputs, which is even worse. Either way, whichever reason it was, why would you use or even want to pay for a Google product if this is the level of QC and broken functionality you can expect from Google products? To further my point. I use ChatGPT to translate stuff from English to German a lot and now I used it to write a legal complaint in German and I tried getting Gemini to translate it as well to compare it to ChatGPT, and instead of doing that, it just said it won't do it because it can't offer legal advice. FFS, I didn't ask you for legal advice, I already did my research on that topic, I just asked you to translate verbatim from English to German. Gemini's "safety" guardrails make it beyond useless at this point that I wouldn't even use it even for free. How does Google plant to make money from it? Or is it gonna be another side-project they'll cancel in 2-5 years.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hackernoteng 3y ago[flagged]
- ImHereToVote 3y ago[flagged]
- machiaweliczny 3y agoCommunism is fun while you can afford it but it usually ends. Google has cash cow so it attracts these political types that produce no value.
- random9749832 3y agoGemini is just a representation of a much larger issue at Google and other tech companies. These places are run by people who think they know better then you and will try to condition you towards their political beliefs one way or the other. The only thing they learnt here is that they have to be more discreet about it. The same companies have long ago already shown they are happy to turn all their platforms into a skinner box and A/B test the shit out of different features until they have maximised their objective functions at your expense.
- ImHereToVote 3y agoThey are also glad to change elections via ephemeral content. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Epstein%20Testimony.pdf https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Epstein%20Tes...
- delfinom 3y agoIdk if it's really conditioning you to their political beliefs with Gemini Images as much as "trying to follow all the modern takes on being non discriminatory AND advertiser AND good PR friendly in every way possible blindly". LLMs are like employees of the company except if the employee says/does something stupid that causes bad PR, you fire them. If the LLM causes something stupid, you are stuck with it and your company appears inept at it.
- nonethewiser 3y ago> “ trying to follow all the modern takes on being non discriminatory AND advertiser AND good PR friendly in every way possible blindly". Which advertisers find the existence of white people undesirable? Its clearly a marginal group of people broadcasting their marginal values.
- delfinom 3y agoThat would fall under the non-discriminatory part of its training and whatever "modern takes" it was fed. If it was fed data from pre Musk twitter, lawd there is going to be some bad training data.
- ytch 3y agoSo will they bring back "Don't be evil"?
- kylebenzle 3y agoLiberal evil is an old invention the left seems to be dusting off.
- alberth 3y agoI see a lot of Google hate in this thread. Curious, who do you recommend using instead (for search, email, AI, etc)?
- shrimp_emoji 3y agoI still use Google for StackOverflow questions (it crawls the Exchanges super well), but otherwise I use DuckDuckGo for search and Tutanota for email. For AI? My calculator and stuff. :p I don't believe in Dark Age black magic monopolized by whoever can buy the most GPUs, so I don't use LLMs.
- nonethewiser 3y ago> “We definitely messed up on the image generation,” Brin said Saturday. “I think it was mostly due to just not thorough testing. It definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people.” This tells me he doesn’t get it, or at least wont say it publicly. It’s a cultural problem. It clearly was trained or aligned with some massive biases.
- data-ottawa 3y agoMy hypothesis: tell a LLM to flip a coin, then tell it the last flip was heads. It will almost certainly tell you the results was tails. It doesn't understand random means random (actually ChatGPT will now execute Python for this). When you tell an LLM to simply include diverse people, it will do that, emphasis on the "diverse" part.
- BXlnt2EachOther 3y agoGemini "free" - Pro 1.0 I think - responded heads on my first ask there and noted the coin remains unbiased and the next flip is still 50/50. I asked to tally 100 more coin flips and it returned 49/51 and gave the Python it was using.
- data-ottawa 3y agoI think executing code is only in Advanced, but everyone gets a free 2 month trial
- dep_b 3y agoI remember a half-assed roll-out of funny filters on Hangouts, like adding ears to somebody's head. Didn't work on our black team members. It was probably never tested on black people before they released it? You can't hide a subconscious racist Asian-White bias by using counter racism. The problem is systemic and it starts at the very beginning when they vet the people they hire. If you didn't go to particular American, European or Asian universities or have a non-super talent career path you're not going to get in. Which is exactly what happens to people from disadvantaged backgrounds or countries. You cannot preach diversity and at the same time not even represent the diversity that exists among white people from the United States alone at the same time.
- alienicecream 3y agoYeah, messed up by making it too obvious. Don't blame the computer, the algorithm dutifully complied. It turns out the input was garbage, and by extension the ideology behind it. The model is just a mirror, and in this case it was too clear of a mirror for their liking.
- melodyogonna 3y agoI still find it baffling that Google could mess up its AI lead so badly.
- 7e 3y agoThe Google founders abandoned Google along time ago, and it's been rotting ever since.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago> the model became way more cautious than we intended and refused to answer certain prompts entirely — wrongly interpreting some very anodyne prompts as sensitive Sounds like the same effect they've had on society ;D