• JWBananas@startrek.website
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    2 years ago

    I asked DALLE-2 for a “wide shot of a delivery driver in a Louisiana bayou with bagged food” and it gave me this:

    That’s certainly a fascinating way to interpret “bagged food.”

  • jarfil@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    “Ethnically ambiguous” is the last thing I’d call that. From 🧍🏻‍♀️ to 🧍🏿‍♂️, I still think the most “ambiguous” is🧍(lacking 🧞 and 🦄).

    • ursakhiin@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      You don’t understand. It says “ethnically ambiguous” right there! It is impossible to associate any race with this picture!

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      2 years ago

      No, it’s an incredibly dumb way because fucking with people’s prompts will make the tech unreliable

      • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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        2 years ago

        You can’t balance every single aspect of the training data. You will always run into some searches favoring one race over another.

    • SinAdjetivos@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      It’s not, the underlying data is still just as biased. Taking a bunch of white people and saying they are “ethnically ambiguous” is just statistical blackface.

    • raptir@lemdro.id
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      2 years ago

      If a request is for a generic person, sure. But when the request is for a specific character, not really.

      Like make one of the undefined arms black.

      • MagicShel@programming.dev
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        2 years ago

        I agree with you, but there is a lot of gray area. What about Spider-man? 95% of the pictures it ingests are probably Peter Parker so it would have a strong bias towards making him white when there are several ethnicities that might apply. What about Katniss Everdeen? Is she explicitly white in the book or is she just white because she’s played by a white actress? I truly don’t know so maybe that is a bad example. What about Santa? What about Jesus? Of all characters, Jesus absolutely shouldn’t be white but I’ll bet the vast majority of AI depicts him that way.

        I’m not disagreeing with you so much as I’m pointing out the line isn’t really all that clear. I don’t like this ham-handed way of going about it, but I agree with and support the goal of making sure the output isn’t white biased just because preserved history tends to be.

        • raptir@lemdro.id
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          2 years ago

          It’s tricky because the data itself is going to be biased here. Think about it - even the video game is specifically called “Spider-Man Miles Morales” while the one with Peter Parker is just called “Spider-Man.”

          Katniss is actually a good example. I was not aware of the details, but the books apparently describe her as having “olive skin”. The problem though is that if you image search her all you get is Jennifer Lawrence.

          That said, Homer is yellow.

          • MagicShel@programming.dev
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            2 years ago

            Absolutely. There is only a single depiction of Homer and I agree that unless you specifically ask for a race bent Homer it shouldn’t do this. I was just pointing out that you can’t draw the line at “identifiable character” because clearly that’s also a problem. Maybe there is a better place to draw the line, or maybe it’s going to be problematic regardless of where is drawn, including not doing anything at all.

            I would say if you can’t do it right just do nothing at all, except as a white guy in a white biased world, that’s self-serving. I’m not the right person to say it’s fine to just let it be.

  • Melody Fwygon@lemmy.one
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    2 years ago

    I don’t like the idea of a prompt being subtly manipulated like this to “force” inclusion. Instead the training data should be augmented and the AI re-trained on a more inclusive dataset.

    The prompt given by the user shouldn’t be prefixed or suffixed by additional words, sentences or phrases; except to remind the AI what it is not allowed to generate.

    Instead of forcing “inclusivity” on the end user in such a manner; we should instead allow the user to pick skin tone preferences in an easy to understand manner, and allow the AI to process that signal as a part of it’s natural prompt.

    Obviously; where specific characters are concerned, the default skin tone of the character named in the prompt should be encoded and respected. If multiple versions of that character exist, it should take a user’s skin tone output selection into account and select the closest matching version.

    If the prompt is requesting a skin tone alteration of a character; that prompt should obviously be honored as well, and executed with the requested skin tone; and not the skin tone setting selection. As an example I can select “Prefer ligher skin tones” in the UI and still request that the AI should generate me a “darker skinned version” of a typically fairer skinned character.

    Instead of focusing on forcing “diversity” into prompts that didn’t ask for it; let’s just make sure that the AI has the full range of human traits available to it to pull from.

    • flora_explora@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      Yes. But this would probably cause friction with the overall public, as the AI would then give a full range of human traits, but people would still expect very narrow default outputs. And thinking more about it, what is the full range of human traits anyways? Does such a thing exist? Can we access it? Like, if we only looked at the societies the AI is present in, we still don’t get all the people to actually be documented for AI to be trained upon. That’s partially the cause for the racist bias of AI in the first place, isn’t it? Because white cishet ablebodied people are proportionally much more frequently depicted in media.

      If you gave the AI a prompt, e.g. “a man with a hat”. What would you expect a good AI to produce? You have a myriad of choices to make and a machine, i.e. the AI, will not be able to make all these choices by itself. Will the result be a black person? Visibly queer or trans? In a wheelchair?

      I guess the problem really is, there is no default output for anything. But when people draw something then they so have a default option ready in their mind because of societal biases and personal experiences. So I would probably draw a white cishet man with a boring hat if I were to execute that prompt. Because I’m unfortunately heavily biased, like we all are. And an AI, based on our biases, would draw the same.

      But repeating the question from before, what would we expect a “fair” and “neutral” AI to draw? This is really tricky. In the meantime your solution is probably good, i.e. training the AI with more diverse data.

      (Oh and I ignored the whole celebrity or known people thingy, your solution is definitely the way to go.)