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Generative AI producing racially biased results? Stop worrying about it, say orange site tech bros. It's just reflecting reality. (news.ycombinator.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Representative take:

If you ask Stable Diffusion for a picture of a cat it always seems to produce images of healthy looking domestic cats. For the prompt "cat" to be unbiased Stable Diffusion would need to occasionally generate images of dead white tigers since this would also fit under the label of "cat".

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

leading to the obvious question: if putting the words “best, good, high quality” in your generative AI prompt isn’t a placebo, then why is all the AI art I’ve seen absolute garbage

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I forget where I saw it, but the phrase/comparison stuck with me and I think of it often: all of this shit is a boring person's idea of interesting

but the "just slap some prompt qualifiers on it (to deal with the journalists)" ...god. it is of course entirely unsurprising to have an orange poster be so completely assured of their self-correctness to not even question anything, but the outright direct "just dress it up in vibes until they shut up"

you just have to wonder what (and who?) else in their life they treat the same way

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

a boring person’s idea of interesting

Agh this is such a good way of putting it. It has all the signifiers of a thing that has a lot of detail and care and effort put into it but it has none of the actual parts that make those things interesting or worth caring about. But of course it's going to appeal to people who don't understand the difference between those two things and only see the surface signifiers (marketers, executives, and tech bros being prime examples of this type of person)

ETA: and also of course this explains why their solution to bias is "just fake it to make the journalists happy." Why would you ever care about the actual substance when you can just make it look ok from a distance

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

it was from a post around the time when dall-e and such were first catching social hype, I think. iirc the article was touching specifically on the output product of visual generators

if I find the article again I'll link it