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AI Companies Are Getting the Culture War They Deserve (nymag.com)
24 points by jbegley on Feb 22, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 29 comments



> It’s also, according to one very vocal group of users, complicit in a conspiracy against white people:

Really? That's the best we can do here? Showing a couple of tweets from a so-called "very vocal" group (gaslighting much?) doesn't do justice to the blatant racism that is present in the image generator.

You can see a video of what's actually happening here. It will refuse to generate white people, responding instead with lectures, while the same prompts asking for black people instead will be just fine. When asking for medieval knights, etc, it will show black kings with white people bowing to it. It has shown George Washington as a black person, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcUSavC7-Kw


No one denied the facts of the matter, certainly not this article. But " complicit in a conspiracy against white people" is still unhinged crazy bollocks. You're seriously misrepresenting the article.


> so-called "very vocal" group (gaslighting much?)

Says the highest voted comment on the post...


Germans can't be black? I never knew that... Honestly at this point, they should just ban the word woke unless we're talking about sleeping. It's such a horribly aged and poorly chosen misnomer.

There is no win with AI image generation, anyone can ask it to do anything nefarious at any time... Artists can technically draw any picture they want, so I really don't know why they're always trying to do PR control over tools.

Instead, they need to apply the logic to improve account control in order to censor and properly tag explicit and offensive material. I still see snuff videos on TikTok and Reddit, I'm worried about kids seeing some of the horrible stuff I've seen online, at this point Ai should be flawless in IDing and tagging negative content. Ai should flawlessly ID the people sharing nefarious content without proper context and even handle tech support and appeals for wrongful cases quickly... That's the real type of use case for AI, not limiting and constantly extinguishing what can be generated by creative minds as much as they do.


No one is saying they can't be, but they tend not to be.

When you ask for a photo of a viking and 75% of the results are Asian/African/native-american, and the only picture of a "viking" is Netflix adaptation version with dreadlocks, leather bracelets and dirt over his face then whatever anti-bias thing they were doing clearly is doing the opposite of what it's supposed to and it's objectively making their product worse.

Stable Diffusion will happily make me Germans, Scandinavians and black people, no matter whether their job description includes raiding coastal cities or not. And it will do so whenever asked for. And without annoying moralizing lectures. Also it runs on my computer and they can't take it away from me tomorrow because they've deemed cats eating fish to be "harmful" overnight. (context: Gemini sometimes refuses to make pictures of animals eating animals, but it's not consistently refusing to)

This mishap is Silicon tech bros engaging in cultural colonialism imposing their own narrow view on the world because they think the hallucinogens they took on holiday somehow made them more enlightened and better than those plebs slaving away outside of their citadel.

Funnily enough they took it offline because it was generating black soldiers when you asked it to generate a picture of a Nazi. Which ironically is more realistic than the black Scandinavians that Google doesn't have a problem with. The Nazi's did indeed have African, Asian and Middle-Eastern soldiers, and even Jewish ones.

Google doesn't care about truth or history. They are doing exactly what Orwell described in Winston's job: alter [the perception of] the past to control the future. I happen to think the ends don't justify the means, and Google has become Evil.


And as we've seen before so many times, one side will say this is evidence that the West had fallen while the other side will claim there is absolutely no issue whatsoever.


This side claims neither, only that these chatbots are not sources of truth and if you believe they are, you're a fool who has no place in tech.


Lots of non-tech people use these tools too.

The complaint is more that AI companies are misrepresenting what their AI is and can do, leading to unrealistic expectations.


The true test of whether the west has fallen is in its treatment of Julian Assange. The juxtaposition of outpouring for Navalny while mute on Assange is telling. We will see in the coming weeks if “The West”tm will put the final nail in its own morality coffin.


Those two aren’t really comparable


What about a comparison to the west's response of Gonzalo Lira's death in Ukrainian custody then?


A guy who no one knew anything about until he got arrested, who said “Women are like dogs, you have to treat them like you would treat a dog. Every woman responds well to a violent physical encounter.”, who doxxed and stalked journalists in Ukraine and pushed obvious Russian propaganda while living in the country they were invading? Yes, I can understand why there's little outpouring of sympathy for him, at least from the mainstream media and government. There's plenty of sympathy for him from other powerful Western figures though!


I actually never considered extrajudicial murder as a western value. Perhaps naively.


It isn't, of course. It was wrong for Lira's pneumonia to be ignored for so long, and the Ukrainian anti-Russian propaganda law is questionable, but if you're wondering why the coverage of Lira is so different from that of Navalny, a man who the Russian govt has tried to assassinate with a nerve agent, this is why.


There is a universal rebuttal on Western discussion forums against anything in favor of Russia: just yell "whataboutism!" Guess what, Russian discussion forums have memes about Western apologetics too. They main ones are "That's different" (what you are doing in this thread) and "highly likely" (when completely made up BS is prefixed with "a credible source said it is highly likely that...")


I don't give a shit about what memes Russian apologists have about Western posters. Flat-earthers have memes about globeheads, that doesn't mean they're right about anything. If Russian posters are tired of hearing those things, they can stop making the same stupid comparisons in every thread and stop blanket-denying anything Russia does wrong.


> Those two aren’t really comparable

Because why? Because "that's different"?

Anyway, I was just pointing out that you aren't the only one capable of blanket dismissing the other side.


Navalny was an activist who organized large protests against the government, ran for office several times, and investigated corruption, mostly concerning money flows between government officials, oligarchs, their companies and properties, etc. The worst crime he was ever charged with was embezzlement and fraud.

Assange is a hacker who's indiscriminately leaked tons of classified info, much of which had little to do with corruption like the unredacted cables and the Vault 7 documents. He's (allegedly) conspired with Chelsea Manning and Lulzsec to basically get whatever he can get his hands on [1][2].

btw, Navalny died in a penal colony serving a 19 year sentence. Chelsea got out after 7.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wikileaks-founder-charged-com... [2] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wikileaks-founder-charged-sup...


But now we are comparing, whereas before it was just deemed not possible. Navalny also collaborated with Hristo Grozev on OSINT projects (which are probably whitewashed CIA intelligence). He went through a leadership training program at Yale, similar to the other US-installed politicians in the post-Soviet sphere (Sandu, Saakashvili, etc). And who knows, he could have gotten out after 7 years?

I'm actually appalled at the way the Russian government acted here, but let's not pretend the US government is all nice and fuzzy and always plays by the rules. Even when the rules are their own.


[flagged]


My experience with this tactic is that when nations sneak in and murder people on British soil it tends to rather put us off them.

Source: Putin vs Skripal, Salisbury, 2019


Didn't that already happen? Like 1500 years ago?


Man, HBO's Silicon Valley needs a reboot.


Or Better Off Ted. The episode about racially insensitive security cameras is comedy gold.


Each episodes’ script should be generated by a different LLM.


These are not truth machines. What do you want from them? Copilot is making up Putin quotes from Putin press conferences that never happened. There can be no expectation of fact from these impenetrable black boxes. They're stochastic parrots and little more. Expecting them to be truth tellers is the silliest thing I've ever heard from otherwise reasonably smart SV people. WTF, folks?!


I think you are seeing just how desperately many people want a "truth machine". Sure, LLM's are terrible for the purpose, but if you have nothing else, you cling to it with all your force. Instead of mocking them, pity them like the baby monkey clinging to its wire frame mother: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow


> What do you want from them?

For starters, most local models I've seen don't stuff prompts with DEI requirements, and actually do a reasonable job of following instructions


and most local modes don't have trillion dollar companies worried about getting sued. are you all dense or trolling here?


I am doing neither, and I'm not buying what you're selling.

Meta's local models contain alignment and censoring, yet it is nowhere near the scale of Gemini's bias. I hopefully don't need to remind you that a large number of local models are based on llama.

Mistral has raised over $300 million. I'd say that warrants being worried about getting sued, yet you don't see people memeing about their model's alignment.




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