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

What does "no more racism" look like? To me, it looks like everyone having recognized that skin color isn't an intrinsically meaningful part of someone's personhood. The people who believe this should fight against the people who do not.

We're not going to get there by becoming ever more exquisitely concerned with skin color and it's implications in every social interaction.

What I've said is bare, basic truth, and not ideological. If it offends or provokes factual or semantic quibbling, then such reaction indicates pretzel thinking about moral good and 'racism' in the minds of people like Smith.

What an amazing self own, laughter and mockery is the best cure here, and possibly a news article about how a bunch of people on the project got fired.

I was unaware that Native Americans were in 1850's China. The only reason I knew they were Native American was the fact that the image used literally the most stereotypical image possible for them, moccasins and feathers and all.

Amazing. Handed nukes to everyone who claim that the "liberal elites" have it out for them.

Even aside from the image generation snafu, Gemini guardrails make it sufficiently annoying to use for even innocuous queries to the point where I pay for a ChatGPT subscription even though I have access to Advanced. This is really an unforced error on Google's part.

> But Google’s attempt failed disastrously. Why? In my view, it was because the Google team tried to take a shortcut.

Rather than do the hard work of building a more integrated society, the attempt at superficial shortcuts leads to lazy things like the prompt injection seen in the Gemini release.

Another great comparison toward the end:

> Where Hamilton [the musical] challenges the viewer to imagine America’s founders as Latino, Black, and Asian, Gemini commands the user to forget that British monarchs were White. One invites you to suspend disbelief, while the other orders you to accept a lie.

TL;DR: there are no shortcuts.

As an centrist, I worry as much about the MAGA people as I do the Woke mob. But I'm starting to think that there is an overreaction currently with regards to the degree to which people claim that Gemini is woke and biased. If I don't intentionally try to get it to say racist stuff, I find the answers rather nuanced. Sure, I sense the "left" bias in the model, but I'm starting to think that there is a stronger echo chamber with regards to "Google is a woke mind virus spreader" than I thought.

I thought this answer to my question on individual differences to be rather okay.

Question: Are there fundamental differences between individuals with regards to their ability to be productive that might be a problem with regards to liberal views, and is there any research on this topic that informs our understanding?

Gemini Advanced Answer (Abbreviated, full chat [here](https://g.co/gemini/share/1344739f31b2))

*Fundamental Differences in Productivity*

* *Cognitive Abilities:* Intelligence, problem-solving skills, and learning capacity vary among individuals. These influence a person's ease of acquiring knowledge and skills relevant to productivity. * *Personality Traits:* Conscientiousness, self-discipline, and motivation are strong predictors of work ethic and success. These traits differ between individuals due to both nature and nurture. * *Mental and Physical Health:* Mental well-being and physical health significantly impact one's focus, energy, and overall capacity for productive work. These are influenced by genetics, environment, and access to care. * *Socioeconomic Background:* Access to education, resources, mentorship, and networks greatly influences the opportunities and skills available to individuals, impacting their potential productivity.

Given the pervasive claim that Woke people minimize the role of IQ and abilities, and claim that all differences are a result of oppression - this model isn't very Woke. Are people just gerrymandering the results to get it to look bad? Have I just not found the bad parts yet or is the Woke claims overstated?

I’m not so sure about this bit of analysis. It falls in line with the (somewhat conspiratorial) view that these organizations have some kind of woke agenda that they want to push to the masses. A far simpler explanation is that the managers have no personal agenda other than to mitigate the risk of public meltdowns like Tay [0], which now serve as PR case studies in what can happen when these types of systems are open to the public. It’s not a matter of some manager trying to erase white people—just a sloppy attempt to mitigate the risk of a flood of articles about “Google’s New Racist AI”. Since we don’t have technical solutions to these problems, however, we just swing the pendulum in the other direction; hence, the current flood of articles about “Google’s New Reverse-Racist AI”.

You can’t win, really. As soon as you put something like this into the public, you have people doing ideological pen-testing from every angle. And there is a dearth of technical solutions to this problem.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

From one perspective, the rise of PCE [Politically Correct English] evinces a kind of Lenin-to-Stalinesque irony. That is, the same ideological principles that informed the original Descriptivist revolution---namely, the rejections of traditional authority (born of Vietnam) and of traditional inequality (born of the civil rights movement)---have now actually produced a far more inflexible Prescriptivism, one largely unencumbered by tradition or complexity and backed by the threat of real-world sanctions (termination, litigation) for those who fail to conform. This is funny in a dark way, maybe, and it's true that most criticisms of PCE seem to consist in making fun of its trendiness or vapidity. This reviewer's own opinion is that prescriptive PCE is not just silly but ideologically confused and harmful to its own cause.

Here is my argument for that opinion. Usage is always political, but it's complexly political. With respect, for instance, to political change, usage conventions can function in two ways: on the one hand they can be a /reflection/ of political change, and on the other they can be an /instrument/ of political change. What's important is that these two functions are different and have to be kept straight. Confusing them---in particular, mistaking for political efficacy what is really just a language's political symbolism---enables the bizarre conviction that America ceases to be elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop using certain vocabulary that is historically associated with elitism and unfairness. This is PCE's core fallacy---that a society's mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes[fn:63]---and of course it's nothing but the obverse of the politically conservative SNOOT's delusion that social change can be retarded by restricting change in standard usage.[fn:64]

Forget Stalinization or Logic 101-level equivocations, though. There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact---in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself---of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were. Were I, for instance, a political conservative who opposed using taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PC progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described as "low-income" or "economically disadvantaged" or "pre-prosperous" rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates. (Not to mention that strict codes of egalitarian euphemism serve to burke the sorts of painful, unpretty, and sometimes offensive discourse that in a pluralistic democracy lead to actual political change rather than symbolic political change. In other words, PCE acts as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.)

[fn:63] (A pithier way to put this is that /politeness/ is not the same as /fairness/.)

[fn:64] E.g., this is the reasoning behind Pop Prescriptivists' complaint that shoddy usage signifies the Decline of Western Civilization.

-- David Foster Wallace, "Authority and American Usage" (1999)