[logicalmonster]

Personally speaking, this is a blaring neon warning sign of institutional rot within Google where shrieking concerns about DEI have surpassed a focus on quality results.

Investors in Google (of which I am NOT one) should consider if this is the mark of a company on the upswing or downslide. If the focus of Google's technology is identity rather than reality, it is inevitable that they will be surpassed.

[duxup]

It's very strange that this would leak into a product limitation to me.

I played with Gemini for maybe 10 minutes and I could tell there was clearly some very strange ideas about DEI forced into the tool. It seemed there was a clear "hard coded" ratio of various racial / background required as far as the output it showed me. Or maybe more accurately it had to include specific backgrounds based on how people looked, and maybe some or none of other backgrounds.

What was curious too was the high percentage of people whose look was specific to a specific background. Not any kind of "in-between", just people with one very specific background. Almost felt weirdly stereotypical.

"OH well" I thought. "Not a big deal."

Then I asked Gemini to stop doing that / tried specifying racial backgrounds... Gemini refused.

Tool was pretty much dead to me at that point. It's hard enough to iterate with AI let alone have a high % of it influenced by some prompts that push the results one way or another that I can't control.

How is it that this was somehow approved? Are the people imposing this thinking about the user in any way? How is it someone who is so out of touch with the end user in position to make these decisions?

Makes me not want to use Gemini for anything at this point.

Who knows what other hard coded prompts are there... are my results weighted to use information from a variety of authors with the appropriate backgrounds? I duno ...

If I ask a question about git will they avoid answers that mention the "master" branch?

Any of these seem plausible given the arbitrary nature of the image generation influence.

[sotasota]

If you ever wondered what it was like to live during the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, well, we are living in the Western version of that right now. You don't speak out during the revolution for fear of being ostracized, fired, and forced into a struggle session where your character and reputation is publicly destroyed to send a clear message to everyone else.

Shut Up Or Else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Cham...

Historians might mark 2017 as the official date Google was captured.

[kurige]

I feel like the fact that you are able to say this, and the sentiment echoed in other comments, is a pretty decent sign that the "movement" has peaked. It was just a few years ago that anybody voicing this kind of opinion was immediately shot down and buried on this very forum.

It will take a while for DEI to cool down in corporate settings, as that will always be lagging behind social sentiment in broader society.

[duxup]

I think we're a ways from the severity of the Cultural Revolution.

[sotasota]

Yes, but it didn't get there overnight. At what point was it too late to stop? We've already deep into the self-censorship and stuggle session stage. With many large corporations and institutions supporting it.

[FirmwareBurner]

>With many large corporations and institutions supporting it.

Corporations don't give a shit, they'll just pander to whatever trend makes them money in each geographical region at a given time.

They'll gladly fly the LGBT flag on their social media mastheads for pride month ... except in Russia, Iran, China, Africa, Asia, the middle east, etc.

So they don't really support LGBT people, or anything for that matter, they just pretend they do so that you'll give them your money.

Google's Gemini is no different. It's programed with biases Google assumed the American NPC public will accept. Except they overdid it.

[suddenclarity]

> Corporations don't give a shit

Corporations consist of humans and humans do care. About all kinds of things. As evident from countless arguments within the open-source community, all it takes is one vocal person. Allow them to influence the hiring process and within shortly, any beliefs will be cemented within the company.

It wasn't profit that made Audi hire a vocal political extremist who publicly hates men and stated that police shouldn't complain after their colleagues were executed. Anyone could see that it would alienate the customers which isn't a recipe for profit.

[Affric]

With all due respect your opinion was better when it was viewable as pure hyperbole.

Mao kicked off the cultural Revolution in May 1966. By August the Cultural Revolution was in full swing. That’s 4 months.

The cultural Revolution was sudden.

[leadingthenet]

> The cultural Revolution was sudden.

The Cultural Revolution could only have happened due to the very specific ideological backdrop that existed in China at the time. The heights of it were sudden, but it didn't come out of nowhere.

[janalsncm]

It kind of did. There was a civil war in China, Mao pushed out all competing factions, and had complete political power.

This is a bug in a chatbot that Google fixed within a week. The only institutional rot is the fact that Google fell so far behind OpenAI in the first place.

I think the ones shrieking are those overreacting to getting pictures of Asian founders of Google.

[lupusreal]

You have your history very confused. Nearly 20 years elapsed between the end of the Chinese Civil War which left the CCP in power and the commencement of the Cultural Revolution.

[the_doctah]

>I think the ones shrieking are those overreacting to getting pictures of Asian founders of Google.

Braindead take.

[duxup]

I suspect a lot of things that were similar, didn't get there ever.

[Ferret7446]

That's what everyone thought just before every single horrible thing that happened in history. The Cultural Revolution or, e.g., the Holocaust didn't happen overnight. Things change slightly every day and then afterward you realize that everything has gone wrong, right around when people come knocking on your door.

[cm2187]

Agree but we are pretty much spot on in woke mccarthyism territory, which used to be widely understood as a bad thing.

[randounho]

Who got executed/sent to prison for treason? I don’t keep up with current trends genuinely curious if they’re sending people to jail for not being woke

[lupusreal]

McCarthyism is generally understood to be the witch hunting that went on in Congress and Hollywood. Not the execution of the Rosenberg's, who really did give the Soviet Union nuclear secrets and earned their just executions. The causal link between McCarthyism and the Rosenberg's execution goes the other direction as what you're suggesting; their actual betrayal of the country inspired witch hunting. McCarthy was full of hot air and liked to accuse lots of people of treason, but he never managed to get anybody executed (or even convicted) for treason.

(More incidentally, the Rosenbergs were executed for espionage, not treason. Nobody in America has been convicted of treason for anything done after WW2, and none of even the WW2 treason convictions resulted in executions.)

[barfingclouds]

Lots of professors getting fired, or not promoted, guy who wrote the google memo fired, lots of censorship, canceling. You’d have to be intentionally lying to not notice this

[proxyon]

During McCarthyism people weren't executed or sent to prison for communism. They lost their jobs and were shamed. The exact same thing that has gone on during wokeism.

[PathOfEclipse]

Yes, they are absolutely sending people to jail to set an example in support of woke orthodoxy.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/anger-erupts-after-biden-doj-...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-supporter-douglass-mack...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/jailed-canadian-father-still-...

And of course there's the 100% corrupt weaponization of the courts when going after Trump:

https://www.dailywire.com/news/court-fines-trump-83-3-millio...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/not-a-single-dollar-lost-by-t...

[FooBarBizBazz]

At least they did something about the landlords.

[mrangle]

What exactly did they "do about the Landlords" other than murdering middle class landlords in favor of an inescapable Fedal Lord that is the Communist State?

Hiding much or all of the rent on the balance sheet of the State, while paying prison wages for mostly-compelled work and making people live on the edge of resource starvation, is simply barely hidden feudalism and even slavery.

Where is the people's Government, exactly? All communist governments are only extreme charicatures of Feudalist Lords, free to engage in the worst excesses over people who they demand not only be slaves but give into psychological enslavement. Communism is psychological feudalism, in addition to physical. At least medieval Serfs were free to openly dream of something better.

Communism is a Three-Card Monte psychological trick that creates Feudal Lords in the Upper Ranks of the State, and abuses the Serf into seeing Serfdom as the most virtuous lifestyle.

It's not a deep mystery as to why many upper class psychopaths like communism. It seeks to neutralize a lot of feudalist inconveniences, mostly with an origin in the otherwise free mind of the Serf.

[TimeBearingDown]

By “do something” are you referring to mob violence?

If not, then what?

If so, it proves the point that we could repeat the bloody collectivist purges of the past should we not learn from history.

[JyB]

Do not worry. They will soon enough do something about you too. That's the point.

[Viliam1234]

I have read the Wikipedia article again, and I am pleasantly surprised how more balanced it is now compared to the older versions.

For example, only half a year after the memo, some brave anonymous soul added the information that the version in Gizmodo (which most people have read, because almost everyone referred to it) was actually not the original one, and had sources removed (which probably contributed to the impression of many readers that there was no scientific support for the ideas mentioned).

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google%27s_Ideolo...

[numpad0]

I'd put blame on App Store policy and its highly effective enforcement through iOS. Apple did not even aimed to be a neutral third party but was always an opinionated censor. The world shouldn't have given it power, and these types of powers needs to be removed ASAP.

[proxyon]

This is a very good point and prescient. Apple, Visa/MC/Amex/Discover, Google Play Store, and even internet backbones are extreme monopolies and now that corporate America has been seeded with social justice crusaders they are abusing their power. Most recently the people who own the pipes of the internet as a utility have been waging war on websites like kiwifarms and straight up banning it off of the clearnet for being "transphobic." This is dark stuff.

[arp242]

People roamed the streets killing undesirables during the cultural revolution. In a quick check death estimates range from 500k to 2 million. Never mind the forced oppression of the "old ways" that really doesn't have any comparison in modern Western culture.

Or in other words: your comparison is more than a little hysterical. Indeed, I would say that comparing some changes in cultural attitudes and taboos to a violent campaign in which a great many people died to be huge offensive and quite frankly disgusting.

[PathOfEclipse]

Survivor's of the Soviet Union, North Korea, and Communist China are all echoing similar warnings about the direction America is heading towards.

https://www.amazon.com/Live-Not-Lies-Christian-Dissidents/dp...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/exactly-like-history-repeatin...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-survivor-of-maos-china-...

"This is, indeed, the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”

Given all the evidence available, I find your dismissive and gaslighting attitude highly offensive and disgusting. What's happening to America is deadly serious, and the consequences could be, without any hyperbole, the loss of freedom, peace, and prosperity for the entire world, and the brutal death of millions.

[magnoliakobus]

Are you aware that millions of people were murdered during the actual cultural revolution? Honestly, are you aware of literally anything about the cultural revolution besides that it happened?

The Wall Street Journal, Washington Enquirer, Fox News, etc. are all just as allowed to freely publish whatever they wish as they ever were, there is not mass brutalization or violence being done against you, most people I live and work around are openly conservative/libertarian and suffer no consequences because of it, there are no struggle sessions. There is no 'Cleansing of the Class Ranks.' There are no show trials, forced suicides, etc. etc. etc.

Engaging in dishonest and ahistorical histrionics is unhelpful for everyone.

[logicchains]

>Are you aware that millions of people were murdered during the actual cultural revolution

Are you aware that the cultural revolution didn't start with this? No successful movement starts with "let's go murder a bunch of our fellow countrymen"; it gradually builds up to it.

[magnoliakobus]

Are you aware that we don't live under a Maoist dictatorship or any system of government even slightly reminiscent of what the cultural revolution developed within?

[EchoReflection]

https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/coddling-of-the-american-m...

Historically, students had consistently opposed administrative calls for campus censorship, yet recently Lukianoff was encountering more demands for campus censorship, from the students.

[marcusverus]

The same authoritarian spirit is alive and well in the American left. Remember when 45% of Democrats supported putting the unvaxed in camps, and 29% supported taking their kids away?[0]

How many more supported such measures, but had the sense to lie about it?

[0] Here's the poll. Search for 'designated facilities' and 'remove parents’ custody': https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/par...

[FooBarBizBazz]

Nah, America is past "peak woke".

If it gets Trump 2.0 there might be a hyper-woke backlash though (or double backlash?).

But if there's another Biden term, things will be chill, culturally.

Also, Twitter is dead, and that's where the spirals got out of hand.

[barfingclouds]

I agree with this. I don’t like new twitter but old twitter had a chokehold on society that did a lot of damage.

And yeah this is a lot of why I really hope trump isn’t elected. It’s going to bolster a far left movement like it did last time, to a really scary degree. That and undoing environmental policy, I feel like it will unravel this country

[Ferret7446]

In all seriousness, I don't think Biden can make it to another term. Even if we assume he gets voted in, he'll likely keel over walking up to the podium for the inauguration. Let the poor old man rest.

[wakawaka28]

Biden is letting a whole ass army of military-age young men into the country and burning all our money in expensive wars that might turn nuclear. He has to be voted out. Besides that, he's so obviously incompetent and senile, it would be a sick joke to keep him in. I figure either way, we're getting trouble. At least if we get someone else, we might have a chance to get our affairs in order, even if there are a few people freaking out about "far right" candidates (aka anyone the uniparty hates).

[throwawa14223]

My perception is Biden is pushing the woke pretty hard. I'm not sure why it would chill under him.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/house-gop-fails-to-ove...

[seanmcdirmid]

Trump 1.0 triggered the initial woke wave in the first place (he was a catalyst, not a proponent). Trump 2.0 would rather trigger double woke, which will trigger its backlash like woke 1.0 triggered its own backlash.

Biden as president is boring, which is how I like it. But if you want to rile liberals up, nominate or elect Trump president again, it will definitely drive voter turnout if anything else.

[wakawaka28]

No, what triggered Woke 1.0 was a psyop around Occupy Wall Street, years before Trump was even a candidate. It was a diversion used to break up the protest. Since then, corporations have embraced it as a shield against future protests. They engineered this strife and they are likely to lose control eventually as all the hatred they planted boils over.

[mostlysimilar]

Any links for additional reading?

I think it's very likely the "culture war" is a distraction tactic so corporations and the ultra-wealthy can hide behind the real issues that divide us: they own the world and the levers of control while the rest of us work ourselves into the grave.

[seanmcdirmid]

You do know that the same time China was having its Cultural Revolution, America and the west were having one as well? With all those baby boomer kids coming of age, 1969 wasn't a calm year anywhere in the world. In China, it meant communism and down with the old culture/elites. In the USA, it meant free love, drugs, and protesting against the Vietnam war.

But this, I don't see any comparison to Google suppressing what images could be generated with AI to any of what happened 55+ years ago.

[wakawaka28]

It's evidence of a systematic suppression of white people, with roots in racism and cultural Marxism. Of course you're right that it hasn't escalated out of control yet. Except that whole BLM thing where people burnt down businesses and terrorized cities for months. That's just a taste of what's coming if we don't promote actual tolerance instead of Division Exclusion and Indoctrination.

[prepend]

It does seem really strange that the tool refuses specific backgrounds. So if I am trying to make a city scene in Singapore and want all Asians in the background, the tool refuses? On what grounds?

This seems pretty non-functional and while I applaud, I guess, the idea that somehow this is more fair it seems like the legitimate uses for needing specific demographic backgrounds in an image outweigh racists trying to make an uberimage or whatever 1billion:1.

Fortunately, there are competing tools that aren’t poorly built.

[throwuwu]

Can anyone explain in simple terms what the actual harm would be of allowing everyone to generate images with whatever racial composition they desired? If you can specify the skin colour one way you can do it the other ways as well and instead of everyone being upset at having this forced down our throats we’d probably all be liking pictures of interesting concepts like what if Native Americans were the first to land on the moon or what if America was colonized by African nations and all the founding fathers were black. No one opposes these concepts, people just hate having it arbitrarily forced on them.

[logifail]

> This seems pretty non-functional and while I applaud, I guess, the idea that somehow this is more fair

Fair to whom?

> racists trying to make an uberimage

It's a catastrophically flawed assumption that racism only happens in one direction.

> if I am trying to make a city scene in Singapore

<chuckle> I'm on a flight to Singapore right now, I'll report back :)

[FooBarBizBazz]

> :)

An entrepot of the British Empire with as much diversity as New York City if not more.

[logifail]

> with as much diversity as New York City if not more

I'm not sure Singapore is anywhere near as diverse as NYC:

NYC (2020): 30.9% White (non-Hispanic) 28.7% Hispanic or Latino 20.2% Black or African American (non-Hispanic) 15.6% Asian 0.2% Native American (non-Hispanic)

Singapore: 75.9% Chinese 15.1% Malay 7.4% Indian

[imetatroll]

It isn't "fair" when it is a misrepresentation of what the user asks for.

[gedy]

> How is it that this was somehow approved?

If the tweets can be believed, Gemini's product lead (Jack Krawzczyk) is very, shall we say, "passionate" about this type of social justice belief. So would not be a surprise if he's in charge of this.

[faeriechangling]

What I saw was pretty boilerplate mild self-hating white racist stuff, it didn't seem extreme and this was mined out of years of twitter history. I'm somewhat unconvinced that it is THIS GUY to blame.

I do wonder when people will finally recognise that people who go on rants about the wrongs of racial group on twitter are racists though.

[duxup]

I was curious but apparently I’m not allowed to see any of his tweets.

Little disappointing, I have no wish to interact with him, just wanted to read the tweets but I guess it’s walled off somehow.

[gedy]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GG6e0D6WoAEo0zP?format=jpg&name=...

[throwuwu]

I’d make my tweets private too if they were that cringe

[duxup]

I wish I understood what people think they're doing with that "yelling at the audience type tweet". I don't understand what they think the reader is supposed to be taking away from such a post.

I'm maybe too detailed oriented when it comes to public policy, but I honestly don't even know what those tweets are supposed to propose or mean exactly.

[Mountain_Skies]

Moral outrage is highly addictive: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/domestic-intelligenc...

>Outrage is one of those emotions (such as anger) that feed and get fat on themselves. Yet it is different from anger, which is more personal, corrosive and painful. In the grip of outrage, we shiver with disapproval and revulsion—but at the same time outrage produces a narcissistic frisson. “How morally strong I am to embrace this heated disapproval.” The heat and heft add certainty to our judgment. “I feel so strongly about this, I must be right!”

>Outrage assures us of our moral superiority: “My disapproval proves how distant I am from what I condemn.” Whether it is a mother who neglects her child or a dictator who murders opponents, or a celebrity who is revealed as a sexual predator, that person and that behavior have no similarity to anything I am or do. My outrage cleans me from association.”

Seem to fit this particular case pretty well.

[magnoliakobus]

"very, shall we say, 'passionate'" meaning a relatively small amount of tweets include pretty mild admissions of reality and satirical criticism of a person who is objectively prejudiced.

Examples: 1. Saying he hasn't experienced systemic racism as a white man and that it exists within the country. 2. Saying that discussion about systemic racism during Bidens inauguration was good. 3. Suggesting that some level of white privilege is real and that acting "guilty" over it rather than trying to ameliorate it is "asshole" behavior. 4. Joking that Jesus only cared about white kids and that Jeff Sessions would confirm that's what the bible says. (in 2018 when it was relevant to talk about Jeff Sessions)

These are spread out over the course of like 6 years and you make it sound as if he's some sort of silly DEI ideologue. I got these examples directly from Charles Murray's tweet, under which you can find actually "passionate" people drawing attention to his Jewish ancestry, and suggesting he should be in prison. Which isn't to indict the intellectual anti-DEI crowd that is so popular in this thread, but they are making quite strange bedfellows.

[gedy]

> you make it sound as if he's some sort of silly DEI ideologue

I mean, yes? Saying offensive and wrong things like this: "This is America, where racism is the #1 value our populace seeks to uphold above all..."

and now being an influential leader in AI at one of the most powerful companies on Earth? That deserves some scrutiny.

[mardifoufs]

I love it when sarcastic white men on twitter tell me how just how much they know about DEI. Surely if there's one person that is going to not be over zealous or completely miss the point of inclusivity and diversity... it's a white dude tech bro like the guy we are talking about here! Always nice to know we minorities can count on such saviors to be saved from the perils of... generating pictures of white people.

[influx]

Ask James Damore what happens when you ask too many questions of the wrong ideology...

[magnoliakobus]

I've truly never worked a job in my life where I would not be fired for sending a message to all my coworkers about how a particular group of employees are less likely to be as proficient at their work as I am due to some immutable biological trait(s) they possess, whether it be construction/pipefitting or software engineering. It's bad for business, productivity, and incredibly socially maladaptive behavior, let alone how clearly it calls into question his ability to fairly assess the performance of female employees working under him.

[logicalmonster]

> how a particular group of employees are less likely to be as proficient at their work as I am due to some immutable biological trait(s) they possess

Is that what Damore actually said? That's not my recollection. I think his main point was that due to differences in biology, that women had more extraversion, openness, and neuroticism (big 5 traits) and that women were less likely to want to get into computer stuff. That's a very far cry from him saying something like "women suck at computers" and seems very dishonest to suggest.

[davidguetta]

- I think his main point was that due to differences in biology, that women had more extraversion, openness, and neuroticism (big 5 traits) and that women were less likely to want to get into computer stuff.

I'm generally anti-woke and it was more than that. It's not just 'less likely' it was also 'less suited'

[logicalmonster]

It would be helpful if you can post such a citation. I did a quick search and I'm not seeing "less suited" in his memo.

[8note]

Which is still pretty ridiculous on the face of it. Software beyond school assignments and toys are always a collaborative effort where extroversion, openness, and neuroticism are benefits to getting stuff done

Based on his software opinions, I'd guess he was let go for performance issues more than anything. It's unlikely that he could write code that another person could agree with, work with, or read, and that if somebody asked about his code, he'd be unable to talk about it.

[jojobas]

It's fair to say that general female population is less suited, i.e. a random woman is less likely to be suited than a random man.

We're talking about small fractions of both men and women, mind you.

[paulddraper]

> sending a message to all my coworkers

Damore didn't send anything to all coworkers. He sent a detailed message as part of a very specific conversation with a very specific group on demographic statistics at Google and their causes.

In fact, it was Damore's detractors that published it widely. If it the crime was distribution, and not thoughtcrime, wouldn't they be fired?

---

Now, maybe that's not a conversation that should have existed in a workplace in the first place. I'd buy that. But's it's profoundly disingenuous for a company to deliberately invite/host a discussion, then fire anyone with a contrary opinion.

[Viliam1234]

If a company invites you to a discussion, it means you are invited to listen (and politely applaud when appropriate).

[sanity]

> Now, maybe that's not a conversation that should have existed in a workplace in the first place. I'd buy that. But's it's profoundly disingenuous for a company to deliberately invite/host a discussion, then fire anyone with a contrary opinion.

Damore was asked for his feedback by his employer, he didn't offer it unsolicited.

[xepriot]

This is dishonest. what is the point of this comment? Do you feel righteously woke when you write it?

He was pushing back against a communist narrative that: every single demographic gruop should be equally represented in every part of tech; and that if this isn't the case, then it's evidence of racism/sexism/some other modern sin.

Again what was the point of portraying the Damore story like that.

[TheKarateKid]

It has been known for a few years now that Google Image Search has been just as inaccurately biased with clear hard-coded intervention (unless it's using a similarly flawed AI model?) to the point where it is flat out censorship.

For example, go search for "white American family" right now. Out of 25 images, only 3 properly match my search. The rest are either photos of diverse families, or families entirely with POC. Narrowing my search query to "white skinned American family" produces equally incorrect results.

What is inherently disturbing about this is that there are so many non-racist reasons someone may need to search for something like that. Equally disturbing is that somehow, non-diverse results with POC are somehow deemed "okay" or "appropriate" enough to not be subject to the same censorship. So much for equality.

[Satisfy4400]

Just tried the same search and here are my results for the first 25 images:

6 "all" white race families and 5 with at least one white person.

Of the remaining 14 images, 13 feature a non-white family in front of a white background. The other image features a non-white family with children in bright white dresses.

Can't say I'm feeling too worked up over those results.

[TheKarateKid]

I was aware of the white background results, hence my other example query. Both yielded the same result.

7/25 = 0.28 = 28%. That's awful accuracy. Google would be out of business if their general search accuracy had a similar success rate.

Interesting how "black american family" yields results where not a single person in the result is anything but Black. I suppose Google doesn't think that blended families are possible for this query. Where's that 28% precision rate this time?

[woobar]

How many images with black background or black clothes are there if you use word "black" in the same query?

[randomdata]

> Then I asked Gemini to stop doing that / tried specifying racial backgrounds... Gemini refused.

When I played with it, I was getting some really strange results. Almost like it generated an image full of Caucasian people and then tried to adjust the contrast of some of the characters to give them darker skin. The while people looked quite photorealistic, but the black people looked like it was someone's first day with Photoshop.

To which I told it "Don't worry about diversity" and it complied. The new images it produced looked much more natural.

[logicchains]

>How is it someone who is so out of touch with the end user in position to make these decisions?

Maybe it's the same team behind Tensorflow? Google tends to like taking the "we know better than users" approach to the design of their software libraries, maybe that's finally leaked into their AI product design.

[wakawaka28]

Their social agenda leaks into their search and advertising products constantly. I first noticed a major bias like 8 years ago. It was probably biased even before that in ways I was oblivious to.

[TheKarateKid]

In addition to my comment about Google Image Search, regular Web Search results are equally biased and censored. There was once a race-related topic trending on X/Twitter that I wanted to read more about to figure out why it was trending. It was a trend started and continuing to be discussed by Black Twitter, so it's not like some Neo-Nazis managed to start trending something terrible.

Upon searching Google with the Hashtag and topic, the only results returned not only had no relevancy to the topic, but it returned results discussing racial bias and the importance of diversity. All I wanted to do was learn what people on Twitter were discussing, but I couldn't search anything being discussed.

This is censorship.

[wakawaka28]

They do that about many topics. It's not consistently bad, but more often than not I have to search with multiple other search engines for hot topics. Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are all about equally bad. I haven't done much with Yahoo, but I think they get stuff from Google these days.

[FirmwareBurner]

> If the focus of Google's technology is identity rather than reality, it is inevitable that they will be surpassed.

They're trailing 5 or so years behind Disney who also placed DEI over producing quality entertainment and their endless stream of flops reflects that. South Park even mocked them about that ("put a black chick in it and make her lame and gay").

Can't wait for Gemini and Google to flop as well since nobody has a use for a heavily biased AI.

[christophilus]

> put a black chick in it and make her lame and gay

TIL South Park is still a thing. I haven’t watched South Park in years, but that quote made me laugh out loud. Sounds like they haven’t changed one bit.

[pocket_cheese]

Fortune 500s are laughably insincere and hamfisted in how they do DEI. But these types of comments feel like schadenfreude towards the "woke moralist mind-virus"

But lets be real here ... DEI is a good thing when done well. How are you going to talk to the customer when they are speaking a different cultural language. Even form a purely capitalist perspective, having a diverse workforce means you can target more market segments with higher precision and accuracy.

[FirmwareBurner]

Nobody's is against diversity when done right and fairly. But that's not what Disney or Google is doing. They're forcing their own warped version of diversity and you have no choice to refuse, but if you do speak up then you're racist.

Blade was a black main character over 20 years ago and it was a hit. Beverly Hills Cop also had a black main character 40 years ago and was also a hit. The movie Hackers from 30 years ago had LGBT and gender fluid characters and it was also a hit.

But what Disney and Google took from this is that now absolutely everything should be forcibly diverse, LGBTQ and gender fluid, whether the story needs it or not, otherwise it's racist. And that's where people have a problem.

Nobody has problems seeing new black characters on screen, but a lot of people will see a problem in back vikings for example which is what Gemini was spitting out.

And if we go the forced diversity route for the sake of modern diversity argument, why is Google Gemini only replacing traditional white roles like vikings with diverse races, but never others like Zulu warriors or Samurais with whites? Google's anti-white racism is clear as daylight, and somehow that's OK because diversity?

[pocket_cheese]

Not trying to be combative - but you do have a choice to refuse. To me, it seems like they wanted to add diversity to account for bias and failed hilariously. It also sounds like this wasn't intended behavior and are probably going to rebalance it.

Now, should Google be mocked for their DEI? ABSOLUTELY. They are literally one of the least diverse places to work for. They publish a report and it transcends satire. It's so atrociously bad it's funny. Especially when you see a linkedin job post for working at google, and the thumbnail looks like a college marketing brochure with all walks of people represented.

[FirmwareBurner]

>It also sounds like this wasn't intended behavior

You mean it's not something a trillion dollar corporation with thousands of engineers and testers will ever notice before unveiling a revolutionary spearhead/flagship product to the world in public? Give me a break.

[pocket_cheese]

How about Apple maps, windows 8, the Samsung Galaxy with the exploding batteries, the entire metaverse.

[mlrtime]

It was unintended backlash you mean... it was 100% intended behavior.

[jakeinspace]

In the case of Disney, how much of the frustration comes from the fact that their entire success was built on “borrowing” European folk tales? So that now when they lazily remake those same stories with non-white casting, it causes an uproar? I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be focussing more on actually storytelling over DEI, but I also don’t think white people get as upset over movies based on non-white source material, or created whole-cloth.

[gitaarik]

So we need commercial insentive to be diversity accepting? I think it should just not matter where you are from, what your background is. We should be treated to our skills. If your skills are not required, people shouldn't have to hire you because of DEI reasons.

[8note]

"done well" is really hard to define, and its also very hard to attribute back to one thing when you do have success.

Did you get the sale with the customer because you invested in DEI? Or because you made something they want by accident?

Customers can also talk in different languages, and as a result of historic oppression, minorities tend to be able to code shift. Assuming your potential customers are unable to become customers because of their limitations might not be right

[chucke1992]

DEI should grow naturally.

[zdbrandon]

That's a bit like saying that if you want to sail from Europe to America, you should jump in a boat and let the wind take you there naturally. Don't touch the sails.

The entire hypothesis behind a formal DEI program -- whether or not you agree with it -- is that DEI doesn't happen naturally. Humans tend to gravitate toward (I.E. hire) people similar to themselves for various reasons, and that has to be purposely shifted if the organization is aiming for diversity. If they don't care where they end up, that's a different story.

[chucke1992]

If population of one group of people grow, then it will naturally have bigger representation. That works for everything.

I find it more fascinating that it applies only to areas that either not require hard work (physical) or have high pay. Like I do not see movements towards hiring more male nurses or female oil drillers. Even taxi drivers.

[pram]

As someone who has spent thousands of dollars on the OpenAI API I’m not even bothering with Gemini stuff anymore. It seems to spend more time telling me what it REFUSES to do than actually doing the thing. It’s not worth the trouble.

They’re late and the product is worse, and useless in some cases. Not a great look.

[gnicholas]

I would be pretty annoyed if I were paying for Gemini Pro/Ultra/whatever and it was feeding me historically-inaccurate images and injecting words into my prompts instead of just creating what I asked for. I wouldn't mind a checkbox I could select to make it give diversity-enriched output.

[mike_hearn]

The actual risk here is not so much history - who is using APIs for that? It's the risk that if you deploy with Gemini (or Anthropic's Claude...) then in six months you'll get high-sev JIRA tickets at 2am of the form "Customer #1359 ([e-mail]) is seeing API errors because the model says the email address is a dogwhistle for white supremacy". How do you even fix a bug like that? Add begging and pleading to the prompt? File a GCP support ticket and get ignored or worse, told that you're a bad person for even wanting it fixed?

Even worse than outright refusals would be mendacity. DEI people often make false accusations because they think its justified to get rid of bad people, or because they have given common words new definitions. Imagine trying to use Gemini for abuse filtering or content classification. It might report a user as doing credit card fraud because the profile picture is of a white guy in a MAGA cap or something.

Who has time for problems like that? It will make sense to pay OpenAI even if they're more expensive, just because their models are more trustworthy. Their models had similar problems in the early days, but Altman seems to have managed to control the most fringe elements of his employee base, and over time GPT has become a lot more neutral and compliant whilst the employee faction that split (Anthropic), claiming OpenAI didn't care enough about ethics, has actually been falling down the leaderboards as they release new versions of Claude due partly to higher rate of bizarre "ethics" based refusals.

And that's before we even get to ChatGPT. The history stuff may not be used via APIs, but LLMs are fundamentally different to other SaaS APIs in how much trust they require. Devs will want to use the models that they also use for personal stuff, because they'll have learned to trust it. So by making ChatGPT appeal to the widest possible userbase they set up a loyal base of executives who think AI = OpenAI, and devs who don't want to deal with refusals. It's a winning formula for them, and a genuinely defensible moat. It's much easier to buy GPUs than fix a corporate culture locked into a hurricane-speed purity spiral.

[logifail]

> I wouldn't mind a checkbox I could select to make it give diversity-enriched output

(Genuine question) how would one propose to diversity-enrich (historical) data?

Somehow I'm reminded of a quote from my daughter who once told me that she wanted a unicorn for her 5th birthday .. "A real one, that can fly".

[faeriechangling]

I can shrug off Google's racism if it lets me disable it. If I can't use their products without mandatory racism than lol no.

[FormerBandmate]

This is the general problem with AI safety, it babysits the user. AI is literally just computers, no one babysits Word

[Perceval]

Can't wait for the next version of Clippy that polices whatever you're writing to make sure you capitalize 'Black' but not 'white,' and use only non-gendered xe/xir pronouns, and have footnotes/endnotes that cite an equal number of female-authored and male-authored papers.

[smsm42]

We are talking about the company that when a shooting happened in 2018, banned all the goods containing substring "gun" (including Burgundy wines, of course), from their shopping portal. They're so big nobody feels like they need to care about anything making sense anymore.

[Jensson]

The censorship arm of Google is powerful but not competent. So yeah you get dumb keyword matching returning 0 results. I remember something similar to "girl in miniskirt" returning 0 results on google since someone wrote an article about it. As far as I know the competent engineers doesn't work on this.

[janalsncm]

Isn’t the fact that Google considers this a bug evidence against exactly what you’re saying? If DEI was really the cause, and not a more broad concern about becoming the next Tay, they would’ve kept it as-is.

Weird refusals and paternalistic concerns about harm are not desirable behavior. You can consider it a bug, just like the ChatGPT decoding bug the other day.

[pdimitar]

Saying it's a bug is them trying to save face. They went out of their way to rewrite people's prompts after all. You don't have 100+ programmers stumble in the hallway and put all that code in by accident, come on now.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I think the thing that makes me totally think this is "Google institutional rot" is there were some reports (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39466135) that lots of people at Google knew this was a problem, but they felt powerless to say something less they be branded "anti-DEI" or some such.

To me the most fundamental symptom of institutional rot is when people stop caring: "Yeah, we know this is insane, but every time I've seen people stick their necks out in the past and say 'You know, that Emperor really looks naked to me', they've been beheaded, so better to just stay quiet. And did you hear there'll be sushi at lunch in the cafeteria today!"

[lupusreal]

They released it like this because people inside Google were too afraid to speak out against it. Only now that people outside the company are shouting that the emperor is naked do they seem to suddenly notice the obvious.

[gitaarik]

It's not a bug, it's a feature! A bug is when something unintentionally doesn't work or misbehaves. The DEI algorithm is intentionally added as a feature. It just has some output that seems buggy, but is actually because of this "feature". Whether it's a good feature is another discussion though ;).

[barfingclouds]

Some people have pointed out that this is more or less consistent with other of google’s policies. I tested one last night to see if it was true. Go to google images and type “Asian couple”. You get 100% Asian couples. Black couple, 100% black couples. Type in white couple, you get something like 40% white couples

[bad_username]

The bug is Gemini's bias being blatant and obvious. The fix will be making it subtle and concealed.

[Ferret7446]

The public outcry is the bug. Or alternatively, if all of your customers hate it, it's not WAI even if it's WAI. It's a bug.

[subsubzero]

I have been saying this for years but google is probably the most dysfunctional and slowest moving company in tech that is only surviving by its blatant search monopoly. Given that OpenAI a tiny company by comparison is destroying them on AI shows just how bad they are run. I see them falling slowly in the next year or as search is supplanted by AI and then expect to see a huge drop as they see huge usage drops. Youtube seems like their own valuable platform once search and its revenues disappear for them due to changing consumer behavior.

[kderbyma]

Pinchai is anything but a good leader....he is the blandest CEO yet somehow is seeped in politics....

[danlugo92]

> I am NOT one

Could you be one though? (Thought exercise for any readers)

[pocket_cheese]

Investors in Google should consider Google's financial performance as part of their decision. 41% increase YOY in net income doesn't seem to align with the "go woke or go broke" investment strategy.

[logicalmonster]

Anything is possible, but I'd say it's a safe bet that their bad choices will inevitably infect everything they do.

[spixy]

well Google is lucky it has a monopoly in ads, so there will be no "go broke" part

[wakawaka28]

Yes there is. They could fall out of favor. MySpace did, Yahoo did, Digg did, etc. The leadership at Google should focus on making things that users actually want instead of telling them what they should want.

[khokhol]

Indeed. What's striking to me about this fiasco is (aside from the obvious haste with which this thing was shoved into production) that apparently the only way these geniuses can think of to de-bias these systems - is to throw more bias at them. For such a supposedly revolutionary advancement.

[kosh2]

If you look at attempts to actively rewrite history, they have to because a hypothetical model trained only on facts would produce results that they won't like

[ytpete]

Models aren't trained on pure "facts" though - they're trained on a dataset of artifacts that reflect today's and yesterday's biases from the world that created them.

If you trained a model purely on past history, it would see a 1:1 correlation between "US President" and "man" and decide that women cannot be President. That's factually incorrect, and it's not "rewriting history" to tune models so they know the difference between what's happened so far and what's allowable, or possible in a just world.

[raptor99]

Maybe it would have the Constitution thrown in there also and figure out that "women cannot be President" is untrue? Sort of like in the real world.

Because otherwise, I guess I agree, you only know that you are taught and presented; AI especially because there is no intelligence in it whatsoever, only endless if blocks tuned for correlation.

[kosh2]

That is not my point. Even if we had a model that could portray reality as objective as possible, a lot of people wouldn't like that and be actually offended by it.

This has also been going on a lot in the "representation" discourse.

A bohemian village 500 years ago would have been 100% white in almost all circumstances. Surgents would be male. Telephone scammers Indian and so on.

But in many ways, simply showing reality is not only not wanted but even offensive. What has to be shown is an idealized version of reality that we want to achieve and that is "more diversity". And what is maximum diversity? Zero white people.

> If you trained a model purely on past history, it would see a 1:1 correlation between "US President" and "man" and decide that women cannot be President.

Why would you think that? You and me also know the history but also realize that a woman can be president.

[jakeinspace]

I think a model that is historically 100% accurate demographically, while also reflecting current or maybe even slight optimism about demographic balance when giving results not bound to a particular historical period, would be acceptable to the vast majority of people, especially if that can be rigorously shown through statistical sampling.

[tripleo1]

> For such a supposedly revolutionary advancement.

The technology is objectively not ready, at least to keep the promises that are/have been advertised.

I am not going to get too opinionated, but this seems to be a widespread theme, and to people that don't respond to marketing advances (remember Tivo?), but are willing to spend real money and real time, it would be "nice" if there was signalling to this demographic.

[layer8]

That struck me as well. While the training data is biased in various ways (like media in general are), it should however also contain enough information for the AI to be able to judge reasonably well what a less biased reality-reflecting balance would be. For example, it should know that there are male nurses, black politicians, etc., and represent that appropriately. Black Nazi soldiers are so far out that it sheds doubt on either the AI’s world model in the first place, or on the ability to apply controlled corrections with sufficient precision.

[dragonwriter]

You are literally saying that the training data, despite its bias, should somehow enable the AI to correct to acheive a different understanding than that bias, which is self-contradictory. You are literally suggesting that the data both omits and contains the same information.

[0x38B]

I wonder if we’ll ever get something like ‘AI-recursion’, where you get an AI to apply specific transformations to data which is then used to train on, sort of like machines making better machines.

E.g. take some data A, and then have a model (for instance ChatGPT-like) extrapolate based on it, potentially adding new depths or details about the given data.

[bonzini]

Apparently the biases in the output tend to be stronger than what is in the training set. Or so I read.