[sqkz]

Out of curiosity, why is this post flagged? I saw two (or maybe three?) other posts today highlighting Gemini's seeming inability to generate images of white men without specific prodding, all flagged and deleted. Are these discussions not allowed on HN?

[typeofhuman]

If it were the other way around, blacks being written out of existence, it would be front-page news. It's flagged because of bias, yet flagging is the bias.

[wmf]

This topic is political and it attracts racists.

[jabradoodle]

Everything is political if you view it through this lense.

This is about the characteristics of a newly released algorithm.

[cinciro]

Anything to do with the polis, or a gathering of people, is by definition political.

Also, I think the "racists" you're talking about already entered the conversation when they programmed their ai to pretend that white men don't exist.

Another point is that it's Google. Google has always been racist. Remember the "gorilla photo" controversy from just a few years back? Were the big heads at Google able to figure out the difference between black people and gorillas? No, they simply removed the gorillas. Remember a few years before that, with the autocorrect? "A white man stole my bike" prompted "Did you mean a black man stole your bike?" It's Google. They've always been racist. Why you're worried about people pointing that out I'll never know.

[brigandish]

I don't remember seeing any racists commenting on HN. YMMV, but it doesn't seem to be a problem.

Maybe we could run all the comments through Gemini and get them cleaned up, so to speak, like we're chatting on a TV programme made for children, would that help?

[DoreenMichele]

The section where it compares results of Viking warrior to Zulu warrior to Samurai is a reasonable critique but I think prompts like "person eating a mayo sandwich on white bread" is reaching.

Racism is a real problem and it's also a very complicated topic that tends to get heated responses, not reasonable discussion. Much of what you get, even from well-meaning people, is just a laundry list of their biases.

I once asked online for help with names for fictional characters. I wanted names that could be mistaken for something else, such as names that are usually one gender but sometimes the other in a different culture or names that you think suggest some specific ethnicity but also happen to be common in some entirely unrelated population.

One of the things I learned is that a lot of Native Americans have "Western"-sounding names because Europeans arrived and some tribes were like "They have cool names. We shall name our kids that!"

So my idea of "Native names" was rooted in me not knowing that much about history.

And also you find that, say, what an American (USA "American") thinks of as a Black person might be viewed as Mulatto someplace else or White some other place. The US has this idea that if you are one eighth African you are "Black" and it is rooted in historic slavery.

Furthermore, concepts of "Native" tend to conflate it with ethnicity as if it cannot be a nation-state identity.

This is deeply political and not comfortable for people to discuss. The US requires Natives to have a certain percentage of Native "blood" to still call themselves Native. It is often referred to as blood quantum and Natives tend to really hate this because it essentially treats them like dog breeds, not nation-states.

If you are a French citizen and your wife is a German immigrant, your child can marry another immigrant and not worry about their children losing French citizenship for "not being French enough." But Native Americans can endanger the tribal membership of their future children by falling in love with someone of the "wrong" ethnicity.

It's a means of breeding them out of existence and saying "You are too White to still be a member of the tribe." which ironically is the opposite of the policy we had for Blacks: You are not White enough to stop being a slave.

Both policies have one thing in common: Robbing both groups of essential human rights, an ugly truth no one wants to hear.

So posts like this don't tend to foster any kind of constructive discussion because the ugly truth is not socially acceptable and, thus, it tends to just end up being horrifying racist garbage with a smattering of protests against so-called "Woke" culture in the name of "Well, sure, I would like to foster constructive changes too, but not at the expense of telling the truth." or something along those lines.

[8note]

Nit: the identity part of of a nation-state is the nation

Canada considers itself a state with many nations, but the US would do well to turn every indigenous nation and reserve into a separate state, likely with more autonomy than the first 50 have. Instead of having 50 states, have 250 or so. Probably a lot more, if you compare to the state density per sqft that the EU has

[DoreenMichele]

My understanding is there were more than 500 indigenous tribes in what became the US.

Someone on Twitter once talked about that -- that a tribe is a nation state, not an ethnicity -- and posted a photo of a White man who had been granted tribal membership of some tribe a long time ago.

I would have included links to that but I have idea how to find it.

[orwin]

Wow I've never even thought of native Americans like that.

Really good insight, thank you.

[cinciro]

I don't know what nonsense you're talking about with being native, but I was born and raised here, same as my parents. I'm as native as anyone else that was born here. And what about me being too white to be in a tribe? This is the United States of America, ma'am, and we don't have tribes. Unless you mean that the only "natives" of our country don't belong to our country at all but live in third world "tribes" in ghettos. Well, I wouldn't know about them, as I'm American.

Also, why are you improperly capitalizing random words? It's rather weird, and not conducive to a productive conversation.