Brin’s “We definitely messed up.”, at an AI “hackathon” event on 2 March, followed a slew of social media posts showing Gemini’s image generation tool depicting a variety of historical figures – including popes, founding fathers of the US and, most excruciatingly, German second world war soldiers – as people of colour.
The problem is that the training data is biased and these AIs pick up on biases extremely well and reinforce them.
For example, people of color tend to post fewer pictures of themselves on the internet, mostly because remaining anonymous is preferable to experiencing racism.
So, if you’ve then got a journalistic picture, like from the food banks mentioned in the article, suddenly there will be relatively many people of color there, compared to what the AI has seen from its other training data.
As a result, it will store that one of the defining features of how a food bank looks like, is that it has people of color there.
To try to combat these biases, the bandaid fix is to prefix your query with instructions to generate diverse pictures. As in, literally prefix. They’re simply putting words in your mouth (which is industry standard).
Nah, in this case I think it’s a classic case of over correction and prompt manipulation. The bus you’re talking about is right, so to try to combat that they and other ai companies manipulate your prompt before feeding it to the llm. I’m very sure they are stripping out white male and or subbing in different ethnicities to try to cover the bias
That is quite the bold statement. Source?
I don’t think I came up with that myself, but yeah, I’ve got nothing. Would have been multiple years, since I’ve read about that.
Maybe strike the “mostly”, but then it seemed logical enough to me that this would be a factor, similar to how some women will avoid revealing their gender (in certain contexts on the internet) to steer clear from sexual harassment.
For that last part, I can refer you to a woman from which I’ve heard first-hand that she avoids voice chat in games, because of that.