TechTakes

I had severe decision paralysis trying to pick out quotes cause every post in that thread is somehow the worst post in that thread (and it’s only an hour old so it’s gonna get worse) but here:

Just inject random 'diverse' keywords in the prompts with some probabilities to make journalists happy. For an online generator you could probably take some data from the user's profile to 'align' the outputs to their preferences.

solving the severe self-amplifying racial bias problems in your data collection and processing methodologies is easy, just order the AI to not be racist

…god damn that’s an actual argument the orange site put forward with a straight face

I commented about this when it was first posted but I'm still angry. These motherfuckers never consider that "reflecting reality" perpetuates that reality. And if AI art never surprises you, it isn't art. But they don't care.

Because reflecting "reality" never affects reality, right? ....Right?

This is gonna be a little off the rails but bear with me:

I recently watched a youtube video that talked about how the contemporary jazz musician Laufey* and her audience run the risk of erasing the history and culture of jazz because they don’t take the time to engage with it. Instead, they are content with replacing it with an idealised parody/pastiche of that culture. Like how people wear mexican costumes and drink on cinco de mayo, or irish costumes on st pats day, or german costumes for oktoberfest, or 1920’s rich white people costumes for a gatsby party etc.

I’ve also been thinking about how the immortality fetish faction of treacles want to do brain uploading so they can live in a simulation forever. I think anyone would agree that such an existence is essentially the same as plopping on a VR headset and watching AI-generated content.

Putting these two ideas together, I’ve essentially reformulated what we already know about treacles et al, which is that they don’t want to acknowledge actual reality. Their model of the world is a pastiche of lazy stereotypes and reinforced by cherry picked statistics. They want to live in a space that confirms all their biases, basically an echo chamber in the cloud.

So yeah, when confronted with an observation about how generative AI produces biased results, we see an expression of the above. The AI produced parody is the reality they want to live in, so there’s no issue.

*I love Laufey. She’s great. You should give her a listen.

sounds like something linus tech tips would say

These guys.

Exactly this. Generative AI shows that most people doing technical work are men? It probably also shows that most construction workers are men, most social workers are women, etc.. Guess what, that reflects reality. If you want something else? You can ask for it. "Picture of a woman welding." "Picture of a black, male social worker." You'll get it, no problem.

Over on Mastodon I linked to an NPR article where they kept asking Midjourney to generate images of BLACK doctors treating WHITE children in Africa and it was largely unable to do so, even with the prompts. Not "no problem," but Midjourney sometimes literally interspersed Giraffes and Elephants into images with Black doctors.

The amount of lazy "it is what it is" takes makes me want to vomit.

Every system has some form of bias, more or less, and a system that has less of a functional bias than another system isn't necessarily a better one

I can't even begin to comprehend how asinine this take is.