[graypegg]

There’s an interesting point to dig out of this I think: the average of any one cultural identity is pretty inauthentic and because ML is pitched to the public as a massive efficiency boost, we’re going to see a lot of output from simple prompts. Not needing to “program” a prompt or over-think your query is the selling point. “Just type what you want”.

Yeah, that means we’re going to see a lot of the same averaged-out caricatures. Your local Italian restaurant will select one of the first 3 options for “Italian pizza chef” for their menu.

IMO, I think the author is trying to communicate that, but attributed blame to the AI tools because there’s other very clear cases of biased training data. (They even mentioned issues with facial recognition and black skin tones)

Human laziness (or actually, using a technology as it’s pitched) is the main factor here I think. The AI dutifully turns your non specific query into a non specific result. Messing around with prompts about Nigerian tribes myself returns pretty diverse results.