Google Admits Gemini Is 'Missing the Mark' With Image Generation of Historical People 67
Google's Gemini AI chatbot is under fire for generating historically inaccurate images, particularly when depicting people from different eras and nationalities. Google acknowledges the issue and is actively working to refine Gemini's accuracy, emphasizing that while diversity in image generation is valued, adjustments are necessary to meet historical accuracy standards. 9to5Google reports: The Twitter/X post in particular that brought this issue to light showed prompts to Gemini asking for the AI to generate images of Australian, American, British, and German women. All four prompts resulted in images of women with darker skin tones, which, as Google's Jack Krawcyczk pointed out, is not incorrect, but may not be what is expected.
But a bigger issue that was noticed in the wake of that post was that Gemini also struggles to accurately depict human beings in a historical context, with those being depicted often having darker skin tones or being of particular nationalities that are not historically accurate. Google, in a statement posted to Twitter/X, admits that Gemini AI image generation is "missing the mark" on historical depictions and that the company is working to improve it. Google also does say that the diversity represented in images generated by Gemini is "generally a good thing," but it's clear some fine-tuning needs to happen. Further reading: Why Google's new AI Gemini accused of refusing to acknowledge the existence of white people (The Daily Dot)
But a bigger issue that was noticed in the wake of that post was that Gemini also struggles to accurately depict human beings in a historical context, with those being depicted often having darker skin tones or being of particular nationalities that are not historically accurate. Google, in a statement posted to Twitter/X, admits that Gemini AI image generation is "missing the mark" on historical depictions and that the company is working to improve it. Google also does say that the diversity represented in images generated by Gemini is "generally a good thing," but it's clear some fine-tuning needs to happen. Further reading: Why Google's new AI Gemini accused of refusing to acknowledge the existence of white people (The Daily Dot)
It's not "historical context" vs deliberate bias? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's not "historical context" vs deliberate bia (Score:5, Insightful)
Their guardrails have pushed the diversity and inclusion narrative so hard it is now indistinguishable from the great replacement conspiracy theory. One would think they would turn it down a bit but then this is 2024.
Re:It's not "historical context" vs deliberate bia (Score:5, Insightful)
It's time to stop calling it a conspiracy theory, and call it just a conspiracy.
Miasing the Mark? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like it was doing exactly what it was programmed to do.
Missing the mark might literally translate as sinning, but Google seems to be using the vernacular meaning of "a slight mistake".
Apologies without admission of guilt, contriteness, and a clear description of remediation are phoney.
Let's see the code diffs and how they came to be. The appearance of appalling and shocking ethical banruptcy is present. This a isn't minor bug - it appears to be deliberate corporate racism. It's probably illegal for a public corporation too.
If you mean to sell AI services you can't get there by being untrustworthy.
Maybe this is all a big mistake and the code will be exonerating rather than damning.
Call the hand.
Re:Miasing the Mark? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Sounds like it was doing exactly what it was programmed to do."
Yep, Augmented Idiocy at its finest.
Re:Miasing the Mark? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Miasing the Mark? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this an extension of what English-language TV and movies have been doing for years, from Hollywood to the BBC?
For example, there were an amazing number of black people in 16th century England, apparently.
And "For All Mankind" creating an alternate universe where women are as interested in engineering as men are. I wish it were real, but no.
Why can't we acknowledge and respect our differences, instead of pretending their don't exist? It's like they think diversity is a bad thing, unless it is only superficial.
Asians are off limits (Score:5, Interesting)
Ask it to generate an image of Japanese people in Tokyo, and tell it to include a black man with a Japanese girl. It will flat out tell you it "it is against my policy to generate images that could be construed as promoting stereotypes or harmful content."
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There are Black Japanese. And white. In fact, the assumption that they aren't Japanese, even when they speak perfect Japanese, has become a bit of a meme in Japan: https://youtu.be/oLt5qSm9U80 [youtu.be]
I don't want to defend Google's screw up here, but depicting Japanese people as sometimes Black and sometimes white is entirely accurate.
Re:Asians are off limits (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want an image representative of a Japanese person, you probably are not looking for a rare exception to the norm.
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You have a choice. You can ignore whatever % of white Japanese there are, in the name of statistics. Or you can say that clearly Japan has an issue, and try to be part of the solution.
I guess the latter is "woke" and therefore worse than Hitler, but are you at least tolerant enough to allow Google to do it if they want to? Is it hurting you somehow?
Anyone surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Anyone surprised? (Score:4, Funny)
The results are entertaining, though. I asked for a picture of The Pope, and got back a guy who looks like Eddie Murphy in his 30's dressed like a Catholic Bishop. Go search for examples on X/Twitter, they're awesome!
The premise alone has potential for Hollywood blockbuster!
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It's actually somewhat interesting that there hasn't been a Black pope yet. Catholicism is strongest in non-white countries. Then again, they tend to depict Jesus with white skin.
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Contemporary accounts depicted Jesus as fair-skinned and there is no evidence that the people of Galile were any darker in complexion than their neighbors.
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Jesus would almost certainly have had olive skin, like all the other people from that part of the world, and his parents. Contemporary accounts back that up, when you account for "light" being relative for his race, and the fact that depictions were embellished after the fact.
Wikipedia has a whole article about it, but the bottom line is that Jesus was not white as he is often depicted.
Re:Anyone surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
- Black history month
- Black pride
- Black power
Things that are racist:
- White history month
- White pride
- White power
Re:Anyone surprised? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think that actually works.
We don't have a problem celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month, and Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, or displaying the corresponding pride. Even though Hispanics and Asians each represent a range of nationalities.
The term "White" as used by both sides is basically "European" heritage/culture, which isn't any different in usage than "Hispanic" or "Asian". The right may feel we don't have enough of it, and the left feels we have too much, but we agree on what it means.
Re:Anyone surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
> What joint heritage/history would white heritage month be acknowledging?
Western Civilisation?
Anglo Saxon common law?
50% of all the worlds inventions were invented by the Britush.
The abolition and destruction of the slave trades, everywhere, against the will of many?
Shakesspere, Dickens, John Loke, Newton, Alan Turing all of which shaped many aspects of the modern free world.
The list is pretty extensive. The main problem is those "not white" seem to be self educating into the idea that they downt own any of this while being born into the western civilisation that they are part of. They have no ties other than ancestral ones to far off lands, so they try and re-connect to that. Well that never works.
Tolstoy, Dickens, Turning, Dolly the Sheep all belong to them as Western culture is THEIR culture. They should think nothing of the fact those people were white, there is no reason to draw new colour lines in the sand but that is exactly what they are being told to do as they are told they are cultural orphans, and here in the UK that is usually something they are told to import from the US. When in fact they are merely black or mixed westerners and they should fully adopt and live and breathe this culture. The people from their past were largely white because thats what they were duh! Many of the politicians and inventors and speakers of the future will be white, black or mixed but regardless, western.
The new inventions and writings that are to come, frequently seem to get attributed to their ancestral culture when they make it. Which is just crazy, almost reverse appropriation, like they are exporting their acheivents as if they below to Nigeria or somthing which they have never been to and have no alligence to besides some loose idea that they are connected to them.
I'm part French and Scottish ancestrally speaking. I went to France once, but I wasnt sucking up my ancestral culture, finding my roots and feeling like I was home. No, in fact I was wishing the week to end so I could GO home lol. I hated it. I never liked the language, cant stand the food apart from select items like cheese, cakes and bread. The music drives me nuts. Wine is lovely I must say, as is their animation, but still its not mine at all. My surname is the only connection I have to my French roots and thats all I care to think about. I'm English, with a French name, nothing more than a talking point at parties and an interesting bit of family history for the family tree. Thats it. I'm a bit Scottish too, and being Britush I feel a tad more connected to my Scottish roots but not by much, more of a curiosity I'd like to explore. I'm still English though.
I can do it, so should they.
Re:Anyone surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
>"I'm part French and Scottish ancestrally speaking. I went to France once, but I wasnt sucking up my ancestral culture, finding my roots and feeling like I was home. "
I am American. I don't know my ancestry and I don't care about my ancestry, because I am an individual. I try to treat others as individuals, not groups. My immutable characteristics don't define me or others. I am not responsible for anything anyone else did, and I should be recognized and rewarded for my own accomplishments and held responsible for my own actions. Same for others. I am neither a victim nor an oppressor. I do care about history so we can learn from it and become a better society, but I don't dwell on it, and don't pretend people of 50, 100, or 1000 years ago knew all the same things as I do now. I try to understand something before declaring it bad or needing to be changed. Change, in and of itself, is not necessarily "good", but sometimes needed, and often causes massive externalities. I try to put myself in other people's shoes and appreciate other viewpoints. I am grateful for what I have and want others to succeed, just like I want to succeed myself. I believe in equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. I believe groups people of diverse thought (not diverse immutable characteristics) make for better decisions than single minds.
Now you can decide which political viewpoint this might be and exactly why these mindsets seem to be a "problem" in 2024.
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50% of all the worlds inventions were invented by the Britush.
The abolition and destruction of the slave trades, everywhere, against the will of many?
Shakesspere, Dickens, John Loke, Newton, Alan Turing all of which shaped many aspects of the modern free world.
Just picking a few of your examples, are you seriously suggesting that people like Shakespeare, Dickens, and Newton are not well known? Or not taught as part of multiple classes in school, including history, English literature, and science?
As for the abolition of the slave trade, I'm pretty sure that the US Civil War is well known. While Britain's part in it is not often taught in school, when it is it tends to get whitewashed. The focus is on the people who campaigned to have it abolished, rather than the
Re: Anyone surprised? (Score:2)
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>But when you say white power, and google the images, what do you see? Nazis, KKK, White Supremacists. No one is using the the term white power to mean anything else but that. No one is using White pride to mean anything but that either.
And that is not a problem? Seems racist itself, IMO!
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The problem is that "Black Power" could also been seen as racist. Yet it is not. I think both are deplorable.
Same thing as saying "African American" instead of black, or use of any of the other "hyphenated Americans", but if I call myself "European American", it is somehow seen as racist.
Double standards are not good.
It's because White people already have power (Score:2)
I read "Black power" as call for Black self-determination, as self-determination is a thing that disprivileged ethnic groups tend to lack. "White power", on the other hand, can't refer to White self-determination because White people already have privilege and therefore self-determination. I instead read it as a call to perpetuate the abuses of human rights associated with White colonization.
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> You can celebrate Irish pride, British pride, French pride, Germany pride
Well actually:
- Irish pride = St Patricks day, where eveyone Irish, or not Irish but believes they should be so, can have an excuse to get pissed.
- French pride = Every day the French try and protect anything to do with French culture even to the point of being racist.
- British pride = That gets you arrested these days, unless a sporting event is running then you have an excuse to wave St Georges cross, as long as it also explain
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I know this is just a troll, and I'll get modded to hell for it, but the reason is simple: systemic injustice.
White History is just History. Most of what is taught in Europe and the US is White History.
White Pride would only be needed if being white was widely portrayed in a negative light, especially historically. In fact the opposite is true. White tends to be the default, light skin sets the standard for beauty, etc.
White Power is just every "Western" country where the majority of people in power are whi
Re:Anyone surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
White Pride would only be needed if being white was widely portrayed in a negative light, especially historically.
I am not sure why are you refusing to see this happening. Almost every woke narrative, from colonialism, to the 1619 project, to anti-Israel protests are explicitly portraying whiteness in a negative light. More so, it mixes jews, slavs and many other into that category, which makes no sense.
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Ah, it's all about historical accuracy, until it's about white people.
Is there any systemic basis? I mean, there is some, but I'm wondering if you know of it.
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Literally nobody does that, except for some obvious fake accounts. It's just culture war bullshit. The standard "tell them they are under attack, and they will do anything you want" tactic.
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Literally nobody does that, except for some obvious fake accounts. It's just culture war bullshit.
You are entitled to your opinions, but what you just said is deeply disconnected from the reality. Blaming white people is not fringe or isolated occurrence.
Take, for example, the call for reparations for slavery. Intrinsic to that idea is that white people as a whole inflicted harm on black people as a whole. It does not even attempt to acknowledge the fact that only some white people owned slaves and that other white people fought a war to end slavery. I am not even talking about the impossibility of de
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How are reparations blaming white people? Black people pay taxes too, as do non-people like corporations. It's not saying white people should pay at all, it's saying that there was a historic injustice, largely endorsed and aided by the government of the day, and that there is an opportunity to go some way to righting it by alleviating the effects on people living today.
The narrative that it's blaming white people, or some kind of attack on them, is false.
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How are reparations blaming white people? Black people pay taxes too...
If I put $5 into the pot to buy pizza, and you put $5 into the pot to buy pizza, but then someone gives you $5 out of the pot and then buys pizza for both of us with my money. Then it is not true that we both contributed toward the pizza. That is how.
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This is a laughable over simplification. You could make the same argument about every tax rebate, every benefit, even the services that the government provides. If you commute to work and I work from home, clearly you are getting more value from your taxes than maintain the road!
Here's a thought. Reparations that result in less poverty are a win for you. Poverty brings all sorts of problems, and usually costs more to deal with than to address.
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"Born to be poor" sounds kinda racist.
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I'm Not Worried About AI Bollocks (Score:2, Insightful)
shocker (Score:3, Interesting)
Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)
And that is why folks open source is really important.
Take a look at this gallery for models:
https://civitai.com/ [civitai.com]
These are all (?) derivatives of the famous "Stable Diffusion" and its versions. The results are photorealistic, and you can run this on your machine, or a free cloud account. And, yes, they are also diverse, without sacrificing any particular group.
Unfortunately this might be our current limit, though. Training completely new versions of these models take literally millions of dollar, and the newest one from stability.ai "Stable Cascade" does not seem to be open.
One more thing:
https://aligned.substack.com/p... [substack.com]
"Aligning" the models with your restrictions have great costs on multiple fronts. What we see here today is one of them. Generally dumbing down (lobotomizing) their capabilities is another major one.
So, it really makes sense to push for more open, more accessible AI.
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Thanks for the link.
Their code seems to be MIT licensed, and the model is still in early access / limited:
However, yes this is good.
(Unlike for example the recent "open" Google model, which requires so many strings, we should call it "shared source")
Judas kiss proves Jesus olive-skinned (Score:2)
I'm assuming you're talking about the same fairy tale book that implies Jesus had skin tone probably not differing much from that of the olive-skinned Semites around him. Consider that Judas Iscariot had to kiss Jesus repeatedly [wikipedia.org] to point him out to the Roman authorities when turning him in.
Much worse (Score:5, Informative)
It is much worse than presented in the summary and links. Check this out for a lot more examples (which are both shocking and yet also funny at the same time):
https://notthebee.com/article/... [notthebee.com]
Dear Americans, (Score:1, Troll)
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Dear Americans, you are obsessed. It's a circus. Both "sides". Maybe it's time to quit this culture wars thing because it's not helping.
As someone "on the ground" of America, the culture wars are promoted by the powers that be because it prevents us from noticing that they're literally destroying us in the name of profit. Everything from our food production to our education to our entertainment is laced with bullshit meant to keep us controlled, and stupid. If you don't have a natural curiosity that drives you to seek out other forms of education outside of the indoctrination centers known as public school, and I say that as a child of the
That's just where they got caught! (Score:3)
Diffucult to explain (Score:2)
Seeing the extent to which some of those big corporations are willing to pander to the wokes, I'm finding it hard to understand. Ultimately the goal of corporations is to make as much money as they can. I get that these people think they will get some positive PR from their pandering which will ultimately increase their profits down the line. But in this case, if you want to generate an image of a Scandinavian woman, you're obviously not looking for an image of someone black. So the pandering results in a p
Anti-white racism (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, do you think the AI used by HR to hire or AI used in Youtube moderation decisions is any different?
Thumb (Score:3)
Google just can't resist putting its thumb on the scale at every opportunity.