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Gemini 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 an

Gemini 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 ago
They 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 ago
Idk 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 ago
    That 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.
  - mrkstu 3y ago
    I dunno, Bud Lite continues to slide into the abyss because the company is more afraid of going against the woke tide and apologizing- it would rather effectively lose in the market than dare to appear insufficiently enlightened.
    - unsupp0rted 3y ago
      Anheuser-Busch (Bud Lite) is actively course-correcting. For instance they hired Shane Gillis as their spokesperson/mascot/brand ambassador or something. Think of that what you will, but it does signal they see the problem and understand it's costing them money until they fix it.
  - unsupp0rted 3y ago
    > Which advertisers find the existence of white people undesirable? It's so well understood that a white guy can't be the protagonist or audience surrogate in an ad that even mainstream SNL and Family Guy make throwaway jokes about it. Is there a white judge or doctor in an ad after the year 2000? Or even a non-incompetent white dad? Nobody ever got fired for making the protagonist not-a-white-man. Can you imagine a Canadian government PSA poster at a bus stop where the doctor on the poster is a white man? Largely, I don't mind this. Up until the 70s/80s, the reverse was true. Now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Eventually it'll balance somewhere towards the center, where people of any color, gender or sexual orientation are allowed to be the bumbling fool in an ad.
- bko 3y ago
  I'm sorry but I just don't buy that. If you say show me a picture of person from background X and it refuses to oblige or gives you a misrepresentation , isn't that the definition of discrimination? Is denying the existence of some groups of people somehow friendly to advertisers? Who in the world is asking to show uniform distribution of some racial/gender groups in every image?
  - polski-g 3y ago
    https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/think-of-the-poorest-person-you-have https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/think-of-the-poorest-pe... > If nothing else, bear in mind that an image generator that has its thumb so heavily on the scale is less useful for users of all races. (A Black kid who wants an image of a typical Scandinavian Viking for a history paper is not helped here.) ... But… what racism does it actually fight? Which Black person’s life is improved by pretending that there were Black Vikings? And this points to far broader and more important questions. We live in a world where fighting racism has gone from fighting for an economy where all Black families can put food on the table to white people acknowledging the land rights of dead Native Americans before they give conference panels about how to maximize synergy in corporate workflow. In a world of affinity groups, diversity pledges, and an obsession with language that tests the boundaries of the possible, we have to ask ourselves hard questions about what any of it actually accomplishes. Who is all of this shit for?
- random9749832 3y ago
  Look up social priming or even just about priming.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
kiba 3y ago
No, it's because they are lazy, not because of political beliefs. The product is just a cash grab. Put it this way: the mindset of a company like google in their approach to moderation is to automate as much of it as possible. They hate using human labor to do manual daily tasks. So they don't want to test and rate the quality output of Gemini over time.
- tyingq 3y ago
  This seems believable to me. Same way they fought spam in the search results. They didn't care about false positives, just whatever algorithm made for less spam, regardless of the end quality. Overweight big companies in the results and toss out good stuff? Sure. It's lazy, but the pure spam was mostly tamped down.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Clearly racial biases are embedded in the model. That wasnt simply the fastest way to build the model. They may have been too fast in releasing, but that’s not the actual cause.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  > No, it's because they are lazy, not because of political beliefs. You don't get a system that will happily output text summaries of the achievements of any ethnic group except Caucasians without political beliefs being a factor. Either allow the query for all ethnicities, or none. Don't give a straight answer unless the query is for Caucasians, whereupon you lecture the user on how wrong they are for even asking that question.
- khaki54 3y ago
  It's probably that too, but if you look a little deeper you will see they put their thumb on the scale in all of their products. Google News media bias representation, manually curated search suggestions, even Google images has very strange results if you look up anything where race or intersectionalism can be injected.
- safety1st 3y ago
  Close... it's because they're a monopoly. They're not really lazy, plenty of people at Google work hard, but monopolies over time lose their ability to innovate or to compete on quality. They are only able to focus and organize around one thing: protecting the cash cow. So with Google that's the search advertising business and as a calcifying monopoly they will struggle to do anything else. They know that AI's potentially a threat but in an abstract, marketing-mutating sort of way their ad sales juggernaut can't understand. So they will throw a lot of money at AI, execs will make announcements stuffed with words like Bold and Transformation, and then they'll get sub-par results. This time around they ended up chasing random internal DEI goals or something instead of building a good product, and who knows what flub it will be next time. The direct comparison is Microsoft's inability to win at mobile, no matter how much cash they burned. Similarly mobile was kind of this existential threat at the perimeter of the cash cow, which was enterprise Windows. So they threw gobs of money at it, but because they had become dysfunctional outside of directly preserving the cash cow, they couldn't make stuff stick. Your Pocket PC (literally they called it a PC!) is a clunker but hey it can connect to an Exchange server! Now let's buy Nokia and run it into the ground!
rvz 3y ago
> 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. Correct. The worst part is Google (and others) know it and will do everything they can to make sure that their reality distortion spells is still conditioning you. Once the issues are so widespread in the public such as Gemini's image generator the spell breaks and there is little room for them to spin it. We're now seeing what happens when reality kicks in and all the perks and goodies are taken away when it is wartime - exposing lots of slackers and coasters at Google.
maxlamb 3y ago
I think this article explains the situation at Google better than anywhere else: https://www.piratewires.com/p/google-culture-of-fear https://www.piratewires.com/p/google-culture-of-fear
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  So according to that article, you're not allowed to use the word "ninja" at Google? Is it because they assume Japanese people would find that offensive or what? Personally I find the overuse of the word "Ninja" in tech cringe, same as the use of the word "Rockstar". But just because something is cringe, doesn't mean it's offensive.
  - scruple 3y ago
    No, that's cultural appropriation! There's a long list of things you apparently can't do or say at Google that all strike me as completely mundane things that normal humans engage in on a daily basis. It's been years since the James Damore debacle yet it still seems like the asylum is run by the inmates.
    - caekislove 3y ago
      "Cultural appropriation" being defined loosely as "doing things while white", since those same people will also let you know that white people have no culture.
hagbard_c 3y ago
It is not even so much that these people at Google and in other positions in society think they know better but that they are convinced that those who do not follow their - rather vaguely defined and quite 'fluent' - narrative are morally inferior people who need to be either re-educated (hence their motto of 'educate yourself') or labelled as such: -ist, -phobe, etc. This is an important distinction because people who think they know better can often be brought around while those who thing they are better are much harder to convince of the error of their ways because those who do not agree are - according to their own doctrine - morally inferior and as such can be ignored or shouted down. You can gather 40 people who think they know better in a college hall and show them why they are wrong. The quicker ones to take up the facts will help pull the slower ones over the line and by the time the session is over many if not most will be convinced of the error of their ways. Try the same with a group of 40 people who are convinced they are morally superior and the result tends to be very different with the group closing up against the heresy from those deplorables. If someone in the group tries to 'defect' he'd not only have to confront his own doubts but he'd be castigated by his own group.

ImHereToVote 3y ago

They 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 ago

Idk 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 ago
  That 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.
- mrkstu 3y ago
  I dunno, Bud Lite continues to slide into the abyss because the company is more afraid of going against the woke tide and apologizing- it would rather effectively lose in the market than dare to appear insufficiently enlightened.
  - unsupp0rted 3y ago
    Anheuser-Busch (Bud Lite) is actively course-correcting. For instance they hired Shane Gillis as their spokesperson/mascot/brand ambassador or something. Think of that what you will, but it does signal they see the problem and understand it's costing them money until they fix it.
- unsupp0rted 3y ago
  > Which advertisers find the existence of white people undesirable? It's so well understood that a white guy can't be the protagonist or audience surrogate in an ad that even mainstream SNL and Family Guy make throwaway jokes about it. Is there a white judge or doctor in an ad after the year 2000? Or even a non-incompetent white dad? Nobody ever got fired for making the protagonist not-a-white-man. Can you imagine a Canadian government PSA poster at a bus stop where the doctor on the poster is a white man? Largely, I don't mind this. Up until the 70s/80s, the reverse was true. Now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Eventually it'll balance somewhere towards the center, where people of any color, gender or sexual orientation are allowed to be the bumbling fool in an ad.
bko 3y ago
I'm sorry but I just don't buy that. If you say show me a picture of person from background X and it refuses to oblige or gives you a misrepresentation , isn't that the definition of discrimination? Is denying the existence of some groups of people somehow friendly to advertisers? Who in the world is asking to show uniform distribution of some racial/gender groups in every image?
- polski-g 3y ago
  https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/think-of-the-poorest-person-you-have https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/think-of-the-poorest-pe... > If nothing else, bear in mind that an image generator that has its thumb so heavily on the scale is less useful for users of all races. (A Black kid who wants an image of a typical Scandinavian Viking for a history paper is not helped here.) ... But… what racism does it actually fight? Which Black person’s life is improved by pretending that there were Black Vikings? And this points to far broader and more important questions. We live in a world where fighting racism has gone from fighting for an economy where all Black families can put food on the table to white people acknowledging the land rights of dead Native Americans before they give conference panels about how to maximize synergy in corporate workflow. In a world of affinity groups, diversity pledges, and an obsession with language that tests the boundaries of the possible, we have to ask ourselves hard questions about what any of it actually accomplishes. Who is all of this shit for?
random9749832 3y ago
Look up social priming or even just about priming.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

kiba 3y ago

No, it's because they are lazy, not because of political beliefs. The product is just a cash grab. Put it this way: the mindset of a company like google in their approach to moderation is to automate as much of it as possible. They hate using human labor to do manual daily tasks. So they don't want to test and rate the quality output of Gemini over time.

tyingq 3y ago
This seems believable to me. Same way they fought spam in the search results. They didn't care about false positives, just whatever algorithm made for less spam, regardless of the end quality. Overweight big companies in the results and toss out good stuff? Sure. It's lazy, but the pure spam was mostly tamped down.
nonethewiser 3y ago
Clearly racial biases are embedded in the model. That wasnt simply the fastest way to build the model. They may have been too fast in releasing, but that’s not the actual cause.
GeekyBear 3y ago
> No, it's because they are lazy, not because of political beliefs. You don't get a system that will happily output text summaries of the achievements of any ethnic group except Caucasians without political beliefs being a factor. Either allow the query for all ethnicities, or none. Don't give a straight answer unless the query is for Caucasians, whereupon you lecture the user on how wrong they are for even asking that question.
khaki54 3y ago
It's probably that too, but if you look a little deeper you will see they put their thumb on the scale in all of their products. Google News media bias representation, manually curated search suggestions, even Google images has very strange results if you look up anything where race or intersectionalism can be injected.
safety1st 3y ago
Close... it's because they're a monopoly. They're not really lazy, plenty of people at Google work hard, but monopolies over time lose their ability to innovate or to compete on quality. They are only able to focus and organize around one thing: protecting the cash cow. So with Google that's the search advertising business and as a calcifying monopoly they will struggle to do anything else. They know that AI's potentially a threat but in an abstract, marketing-mutating sort of way their ad sales juggernaut can't understand. So they will throw a lot of money at AI, execs will make announcements stuffed with words like Bold and Transformation, and then they'll get sub-par results. This time around they ended up chasing random internal DEI goals or something instead of building a good product, and who knows what flub it will be next time. The direct comparison is Microsoft's inability to win at mobile, no matter how much cash they burned. Similarly mobile was kind of this existential threat at the perimeter of the cash cow, which was enterprise Windows. So they threw gobs of money at it, but because they had become dysfunctional outside of directly preserving the cash cow, they couldn't make stuff stick. Your Pocket PC (literally they called it a PC!) is a clunker but hey it can connect to an Exchange server! Now let's buy Nokia and run it into the ground!

rvz 3y ago

> 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. Correct. The worst part is Google (and others) know it and will do everything they can to make sure that their reality distortion spells is still conditioning you. Once the issues are so widespread in the public such as Gemini's image generator the spell breaks and there is little room for them to spin it. We're now seeing what happens when reality kicks in and all the perks and goodies are taken away when it is wartime - exposing lots of slackers and coasters at Google.

maxlamb 3y ago

I think this article explains the situation at Google better than anywhere else: https://www.piratewires.com/p/google-culture-of-fear https://www.piratewires.com/p/google-culture-of-fear

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
So according to that article, you're not allowed to use the word "ninja" at Google? Is it because they assume Japanese people would find that offensive or what? Personally I find the overuse of the word "Ninja" in tech cringe, same as the use of the word "Rockstar". But just because something is cringe, doesn't mean it's offensive.
- scruple 3y ago
  No, that's cultural appropriation! There's a long list of things you apparently can't do or say at Google that all strike me as completely mundane things that normal humans engage in on a daily basis. It's been years since the James Damore debacle yet it still seems like the asylum is run by the inmates.
  - caekislove 3y ago
    "Cultural appropriation" being defined loosely as "doing things while white", since those same people will also let you know that white people have no culture.

hagbard_c 3y ago

It is not even so much that these people at Google and in other positions in society think they know better but that they are convinced that those who do not follow their - rather vaguely defined and quite 'fluent' - narrative are morally inferior people who need to be either re-educated (hence their motto of 'educate yourself') or labelled as such: -ist, -phobe, etc. This is an important distinction because people who think they know better can often be brought around while those who thing they are better are much harder to convince of the error of their ways because those who do not agree are - according to their own doctrine - morally inferior and as such can be ignored or shouted down. You can gather 40 people who think they know better in a college hall and show them why they are wrong. The quicker ones to take up the facts will help pull the slower ones over the line and by the time the session is over many if not most will be convinced of the error of their ways. Try the same with a group of 40 people who are convinced they are morally superior and the result tends to be very different with the group closing up against the heresy from those deplorables. If someone in the group tries to 'defect' he'd not only have to confront his own doubts but he'd be castigated by his own group.