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Feb 23Liked by Patrick McGuinness

The black "Nazi" soldier is just awful, given the vicious persecution that Afro-Germans faced in Nazi Germany, in addition to being ahistorical (Afro-Germans were barred from the military). https://wagner.edu/holocaust-center/afro-germans-black-soldiers-holocaust/

However, I'm surprised by your angry reaction to the pictures of "young Irish woman". It's 2024, immigration is a thing, there are absolutely young Irish women that look like each of the women in that picture, and why the concern about proportional representation? I'd rather be presented with a choice of Irish women of 4 different ethnicities than with 4 pics of similar-looking women.

It's also noteworthy that Gemini apparently absolutely cannot draw a swastika. I've seen better efforts from 9-year-olds.

In any case, you're right that it's a cultural issue at Google, although I don't think you've pinpointed the right one. It's easy to see why Google resorted to adjusting the system prompt: they trained on mostly pics of white people, so "laughing man" gets a white man every time, and that's a problem for all of their users who want to be presented with a range of options reflecting everyone else in the world. Google's problem isn't that they're super woke, it's that they tried slapping a bandaid on, rather than figuring out how to fix the underlying issue.

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Feb 23·edited Feb 23Author

First, agreement that Gemini / Imagen2 is just bad relative to other latest-and-greatest image generation tools, completely apart from their diversity depictions.

Second, I'm not 'angry' at the depictions of 'diverse' Irish women, but pointing out the flaws in enforced diversity generation. While there are immigrants to Ireland from diverse backgrounds in Ireland today, the traditionally ethnically celtic Ireland is still 90% white, with fewer than 1% of African heritage, fewer than 2% from Asia, etc. So the output is not 'representative' even though stated goal of 'diversity' is supposedly fair representation. Statistical misalignment is another example of flaws in enforced diversity generation, albeit less objectionable than simply refusing to draw some things (like the white doctor refusal) and not as wrong as black German Nazis or Indian woman Popes. BTW, Frank Fleming tried it to draw someone called Seamus, a male celtic name, and got an Indian man and a woman. It's a funny way of showing the flaws in re-prompting for diversity.

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Feb 23Liked by Patrick McGuinness

Salesforce too

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