Brin’s “We definitely messed up.”, at an AI “hackathon” event on 2 March, followed a slew of social media posts showing Gemini’s image generation tool depicting a variety of historical figures – including popes, founding fathers of the US and, most excruciatingly, German second world war soldiers – as people of colour.
I don’t know that “offensive” is the right word. More just “shitty” and “lazy”.
Like they took the time out to teach it “diversity” but couldn’t bother to train it past “diversity = people who are not white” or to acknowledge when the user is asking specifically for a white person or a different region or time period.
I, for one, welcome Japanese George Washington, Indian Hitler and Inuit Ghandi to our historical database.
Jojo Rabbit featured Jewish Maori Hitler and was very well received.
I think the lesson here is that political correctness isn’t very machine learnable. Human history and modern social concerns are very complex in a precise way and really should be addressed with conventional rules and algorithms. Or manually, but that’s obviously not scalable at all.