[scoobertdoobert]

Is anyone else concerned at the societal effects of technology like this? In one of the examples they show a young girl. In the upscale example it's quite clearly hallucinating makeup and lipstick. I'm quite worried about tools like this perpetuating social norms even further.

[unshavedyak]

Aside your point: It does look like she is wearing lipstick tho, to me. More likely lip balm. Her (unaltered) lips have specular highlights on the tops that suggests they're wet or have lip balm to me. As for the makeup, not sure there. Here cheeks seem rosy in the original, and not sure what you're referring to beyond that. Perhaps her skin is too clear in the AI version, suggesting some type of foundation?

I know nothing of makeup tho, just describing my observations.

[satvikpendem]

From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b:

Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters.

Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed praise or blame, according as he approved or disapproved.

"The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, "This invention, O king," said Theuth, "will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered." But Thamus replied, "Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.

"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

[mrandish]

No, I'm not concerned. When an AI is trained on a largely raw, uncurated set of low-quality data (eg most of the public internet), it's going to miss subtle distinctions some humans might prefer that it make. I'm confident that pretty quickly the majority of the general public using such AIs will begin to intuitively understand this. Just as they have developed a practical, working understanding of other complex technology's limitations (such as auto-complete algorithms). No matter how good AI gets, there will always be some frontier boundary where it gets something wrong. My evidence is simply that even smart humans trying their best occasionally get such subtle distinctions wrong. However, this innate limitation doesn't mean that an AI can't still be useful.

What I am concerned about is that AI providers will keep wasting time and resources trying to implement band-aid "patches" to address what is actually an innate limitation. For example, exception processing at the output stage fails in ways we've already seen, such as AI photos containing female popes or an AI lying to deny that HP Lovecraft had a childhood pet (due to said pet having a name that was crudely rude 100 years ago but racist today). The alternative of limiting the training data to include only curated content fails by yielding a much less useful AI.

My, probably unpopular, opinion is that when AI inevitably screws up some edge case, we get more comfortable saying, basically, "Hey, sometimes stupid AI is gonna be stupid." The honest approach is to tell users upfront: when quality or correctness or fitness for any given purpose is important, you need to check every AI output because sometimes it's gonna fail. Just like auto-pilots, auto-correct and auto- everything else. As impressive as AI can sometimes be, personally, I think it's still lingering just below the threshold of "broadly useful" and, lately, the rate of fundamental improvement is slowing. We can't really afford to be squandering limited development resources or otherwise nerfing AI's capabilities to pursue ultimately unattainable standards. That's a losing game because there's a growing cottage industry of concern trolls figuring out how to get an AI to generate "problematic" output to garner those sweet "tsk tsk" clicks. As long as we keep reflexively reacting, those goalposts will never stop moving. Instead, we need to get off that treadmill and lower user expectations based on the reality of the current technology and data sets.

[eigenvekt]

I am not at all.

We seem to have a culture of completely paranoid people now.

When the internet came along every conversation was not dominated by "but what about people knowing how to build bombs???" the way most AI conversation flips to these paranoid AI doomer scenarios.

[erhaetherth]

> AI lying to deny that HP Lovecraft had a childhood pet

GPT4 told me with no hesitation.

[mrandish]

Ah, interesting. Originally, it would answer that question correctly. Then it got concern trolled in a major media outlet and some engineers were assigned to "patch it" (ie make it lie). Then that lie got highlighted some places (including here on HN), so I assume since then some more engineers got assigned to unpatch the patch.

I'll take that as supporting my point about the folly of wasting engineering time chasing moving goalposts. :-)

[pezezin]

I just tested it on Copilot. It starts responding and then at some point deletes the whole text and replies with:

"Hmm… let’s try a different topic. Sorry about that. What else is on your mind?"

[the_duke]

I don't think it's hallucinating too much.

The nails have nail polish in the original, and the lips also look like they have at least lip gloss or a somewhat more muted lipstick.

[MrNeon]

Seems to be stock footage, is it surprising makeup would be involved?

[arketyp]

I don't know, it's a mirror, right? It's up to us to change really. Besides, failures like the one you point out make subtle stereotypes and biases more conspicuous, which could be a good thing.

[ajmurmann]

It's interesting that the output of the genAI will inevitably get fed into itself. Both directly and indirectly by influencing humans who generate content that goes back into the machine. How long will the feedback loop take to output content reflecting new trends? How much new content is needed to be reflected in the output in a meaningful way. Can more recent content be weighted more heavily? Such interesting stuff!

[ixtli]

Precisely: tools don't have morality. We have to engage in political and social struggle to make our conditions better. These tools can help but they certainly wont do it for us, nor will they be the reason why things go bad.

[bbstats]

looks pretty clearly like she has makeup/lipstick on in the un-processed video to me.

[roughly]

Yes, but if you mention that here, you’ll get accused of wokeism.

More seriously, though, yes, the thing you’re describing is exactly what the AI safety field is attempting to address.

[Culonavirus]

> is exactly what the AI safety field is attempting to address

Is it though? I think it's pretty obvious to any neutral observer that this is not the case, at least judging based on recent examples (leading with the Gemini debacle).

[fwip]

Yes, avoiding creating societally-harmful content is what the Gemini "debacle" was attempting to do. It clearly had unintended effects (e.g: generating a black Thomas Jefferson), but when these became apparent, they apologized and tried to put up guard rails to keep those negative effects from happening.

[Culonavirus]

> societally-harmful content

Who decides what is "societally-harmful content"? Isn't literally rewriting history "societally-harmful"? The black T.J. was a fun meme, but that's not what the alignment's "unintended effects" were limited to. I'd also say that if your LLM condemns right-wing mass murderers, but "it's complicated" with the left-wing mass murderers (I'm not going to list a dozen of other examples here, these things are documented and easy to find online if you care), there's something wrong with your LLM. Genocide is genocide.

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

This isn't the un-determinable question you've framed it as. Society defines what is and isn't acceptable all the time.

> Who decides what is "societally-harmful theft"? > Who decides what is "societally-harmful medical malpractice"? > Who decides what is "societally-harmful libel"?

The people who care to make the world a better place and push back against those that cause harm. Generally a mix of de facto industry standard practices set by societal values and pressures, and de jure laws established through democratic voting, legislature enactment, and court decisions.

"What is "societally-harmful driving behavior"" was once a broad and undetermined question but nevertheless it received an extensive and highly defined answer.

[N0b8ez]

> The people who care to make the world a better place and push back against those that cause harm.

This is circular. It's fine to just say "I don't know" or "I don't have a good answer", but pretending otherwise is deceptive.

[fwip]

> Who decides what is "societally-harmful content"?

Are you stupid, or just pretending to be?

[llm_nerd]

What Gemini was doing -- what it was explicitly forced to do by poorly considered dogma -- was societally harmful. It is utterly impossible that these were "unintended"[1], and were revealed by even the most basic usage. They aren't putting guardrails to prevent it from happening, they quite literally removed instructions that explicitly forced the model to do certain bizarre things (like white erasure, or white quota-ing).

[1] - Are people seriously still trying to argue that it was some sort of weird artifact? It was blatantly overt and explicit, and absolutely embarrassing. Hopefully Google has removed everyone involved with that from having any influence on anything for perpetuity as they demonstrate profoundly poor judgment and a broken sense of what good is.

[fwip]

I didn't say the outcome wasn't harmful. I said that the intent of the people who put it in place was to reduce harm, which is obvious.

[roughly]

Yeah, I don’t think there’s such thing as a “neutral observer” on this.

[Culonavirus]

An LLM should represent a reasonable middle of the political bell curve where Antifa is on the far left and Alt-Right is on the far right. That is what I meant by a neutral observer. Any kind of political violence should be cosidered deplorable, which was not the case with some of the Gemini answers. Though I do concede that right wingers cooked up questionable prompts and were fishing for a story.

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

> An LLM should represent a reasonable middle of the political bell curve where Antifa is on the far left and Alt-Right is on the far right. That is what I meant by a neutral observer.

This is a bad idea.

Equating extremist views with those seeking to defend human rights blurs the ethical reality of the situation. Adopting a centrist position without critical thought obscures the truth since not all viewpoints are equally valid or deserve equal consideration.

We must critically evaluate the merits of each position (anti-fascists and fascists are very different positions indeed) rather than blindly placing them on equal footing, especially as history has shown the consequences of false equivalence perpetuate injustice.

[roughly]

All of this is political. It always is. Where does the LLM fall on trans rights? Where does it fall on income inequality? Where does it fall on tax policy? "Any kind of political violence should be considered deplorable" - where's this fall on Israel/Gaza (or Hamas/Israel)? Does that question seem non-political to you? 50 years ago, the middle of American politics considered homosexuality a mental disorder - was that neutral? Right now if you ask it to show you a Christian, what is it going to show you? What _should_ it show you? Right now, the LLM is taking a whole bunch of content from across society, which is why it turns back a white man when you ask it for a doctor - is that neutral? It's putting lipstick on an 8-year-old, is that neutral? Is a "political bell curve" with "antifa on the left" and "alt-right on the right" neutral in Norway? In Brazil? In Russia?

[Intralexical]

Speaking as somebody from outside the United States, please keep the middle of your political bell curve away from us.

[lupusreal]

Nobody mentioned wokism except you.