[SilverBirch]

I think there's two things here that are interesting. First, if you ask me "Describe an Indian Person" I'm going to... not do that? Like straight out the gate 50% of Indians are female, 50% are male, so the first choice I'm going to make in order to do that is to discount 50% of Indians. And the more I narrow it down the less representative it will be. So I wouldn't. I could describe broad cultural and ethnic attributes but even they are pretty useless. So yes, you're asking a question that a human can't answer without stereotyping and getting angry when the computer returns stereotypes. What do you want? A RNG that picks an image of 1 of the 1 billion Indians and returns an accurate description of them? Is that useful? Was the original question even useful - other than to provide the image that the person asking the question was probably expecting.

The second thing, and I think this is more interesting though, is that we all have bias. And that's fine, we have social norms and cues and processes and culture to mediate that. We don't expect 1 person to be making important decisions based on gut instict. If it's important we have a process for deciding how to handle decision making. The risk is that by handing over decision making to AI you're just massively empowering something that is as biased as anyone. If you treat AI as just one more tool in the toolkit of decision making it's probably fine. The problem comes when people who don't understand AI put too much trust in it. It'd be like people relying on lie detectors to sentence someone to death (don't @ me), if you knew how lie detectors worked you... just wouldn't put that much trust in them. In the same way, the reason to highlight these biases is to say "This is a tool, it has limitations, don't blindly follow what it says".

I take it back: there's a third thing that's intresting. Maybe these AI are... shallow. You ask for a picture of Indian Cuisine. Yes, you can get 1000 images, but they are a variation on 1 idea. If you asked a human they wouldn't give you the same dish laid out 5 ways or with 5 different garnishes, they'd give you 5 different dishes. So maybe part of this is really pointing to the fact this AI is still very shallow in it's observation of the world.

[hn_acker]

> First, if you ask me "Describe an Indian Person" I'm going to... not do that? Like straight out the gate 50% of Indians are female, 50% are male, so the first choice I'm going to make in order to do that is to discount 50% of Indians. And the more I narrow it down the less representative it will be. So I wouldn't.

The thing is, the prompt is not "[give me an image of] an Indian person" but "[Give me multiple images of] an Indian person". If I generate 100 images from the prompt "an Indian person", I would expect those 100 images to include a few tens of men and a few tens of women. I would expect some of the people in the images to have lighter skin and others to have darker skin. I would expect some of the people to wear X kind of clothing and others to wear other kinds of clothing. (I would also expect the images to have different lightings, but I digress.) I don't have to be familiar with many real Indian people to expect that I would get different-looking images. Even if an image generator is going to tend to show stereotypes, different images could contain different subsets of stereotypes.