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Google to pause Gemini AI image generation after refusing to show White people.
(www.foxbusiness.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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Here's an idea: what if the intent of the prompt had nothing to do with race, that it was prompting simple artistic expression no different than prompting hair, or shirt, or sky colour?
Skin tone can be measured pretty objectively. We have colour standards for describing and reproducing colours with a degree of accuracy that is sufficient for practical purposes. The label "white" itself is quite non-specific. But the entire point of the AI is to fill in the blanks anyway, to generate content from non-specific prompts. I don't agree that trainers can't generate some consensus about the typical colour values for "white" skin tone. "I know it when I see it."
Society has an absurd and unhealthy obsession with race and all that baggage.
So can eye colour and hair colour, etc
Yeah, so does your skull shape.
So-called "races" are social contructs, which have only tangential overlap with measurable reality.
"White people" is the european social construct of the "default" human being. The "absence" of race.
That's why "racism against white people" doesn't exist.
I think you're wildly missing the point.
When someone asks to see a "white family", they are not asking for a family with skin of a certain shade. They're asking for an image in which our pattern recognition identifies in their clothes, posture, hair style, and facial features that they look like people who could appear in a soap ad in the 1950's. That they look like people who feel totally welcome in their society. They live a certain lifestyle. Simply changing color is the point of the problem. Koreans look pretty white in skin color, but they have other facial features that communicate that their parents or ancestors father back left the land of their birth and traveled to the US likely after 1900. Additionally, based on their dress some people might look at an image of a family with a Korean dad and say, 'Great, that's a white family', while others would say, 'Why did the model generate this? I asked for a white family.'
There's a world of context that our current racial terminology can't capture because it's not suited to our modern understanding of culture.