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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Corporations and governments do consist of people and people do care...but it's also the case the being a cog in a large organization does have a tendency to induce stuff like "I was just following orders" or "It's not my problem, someone else needs to fix it" :-/
>It wasn't profit that made Audi hire a vocal political extremist
Sure, the problem with these huge wealthy companies like Audi, Google, Apple, etc is that the people who run them are insanely detached from the trenches the Average Joe lives in (see the Silicon Valley satire), and end up hiring a buch of useless weirdos in positions they shouldn't be in, simply because they have the right background/connections and the people hiring them are equally clueless but have the imense resources of the corporations at their disposal to risk and spend on such frivolities, and at their executive levels there's no clear KPIs to keep them in check, like ICs have.
So inevitably a lot of these big wealthy companies end up hiring people who use the generous resources of their new employer for personal political activism knowing the company can't easily fire them now due to the desire of the company to not rock the boat and cause public backlash for firing someone public facing who might also be a minority or some other protected category.
BTW, got any source on the Audi story? Would love to know more?
> So inevitably a lot of these big wealthy companies end up hiring people who use the generous resources of their new employer for personal political activism knowing the company can't easily fire them now due to the desire of the company to not rock the boat and cause public backlash for firing someone public facing who might also be a minority or some other protected category.
Exactly. This has been my experience. The political axe grinders get hired. They bring their personal politics to work. Slowly they hire people who agree with them. Then they're all bringing their politics to work. Finally, the entire company changes and becomes dysfunctional.
This is what Coinbase and Kraken FX stopped in their company saying it was destroying them.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That’s not at all inconsistent with what the GP said. The point was that the impacts of thr Cultural Revolution depended on it being imposed top down by an authoritarian, unitary state with no constraints.
The cultural revolution was initiated by Mao because he was losing power and wanted to regain it. Even then it didn't happen overnight. It was preceded by a generation of buildup (in fact many of the violent perpetrators were young teenagers who were born after the Civil War had ended).
And even if you start counting from when Mao initiated it, it still didn't kick into full swing overnight.
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.
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
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.)
And the problem with McCarthyism wasn't so much what was happening in congress, it is that the accusation of being a communist made you unemployable in Hollywood or elsewhere. It's extraordinary that Hollywood re-established a black list after having produced so many movies complaining about those years. You are now required to show loyalty to the woke agenda in university admissions, research grants, hiring and promotion process in large companies.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
>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.
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?
Historically, students had consistently opposed administrative calls for campus censorship, yet recently Lukianoff was encountering more demands for campus censorship, from the students.
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?
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
This will keep you busy: https://newdiscourses.com/ He is really a great speaker. Jimmy Dore and Glenn Greenwald also cover a lot of stuff on their channels.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
>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.”
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
- 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'
"women have more interest people to things so to improve their situation we should increase pair-programming, however there are limits to how people oriented some SE roles are".
This is literally saying we should change SWE roles to make it more suited to women... i.e. women are not suited for that currently.
But that's not talking about suitability to architect solutions or write code, it's talking about the surrounding process infrastructure and making it more approachable to people so that people who are suited to software engineering have a space where they can deliver on it.
When businessses moved towards open offices, this infrastructure change made SWE roles more approachable for extroverts and opened the doors of the trade to people not suited to the solitude of private offices. Extroverts and verbally collaborative people love open offices and often thrive in them.
That doesn't imply that extroverts weren't suited to writing software. It just affirms the obvious fact that some enviornments are more inviting to certain people, and that being considerate of those things can make more work available to more people.
Open offices are the GNOME of layouts: they cater to the wrong crowd.
Programming rewards introverts content to self-study in solitude and hack away at code the way Linux caters to power user neck beards. For extroverts and normies, those things are both torture. Those stereotypes exist for a reason, and it's fundamentally flawed not to tune towards them.
So he's actually thinking of ways to improve the work environment for woman, and people are blaming him for saying that woman are not suitable for the work?
It's not about what you say, it's about how the article reporting on you describes you.
"We could do these changes at Google to make it a better place for women." "So, what you are saying is that women are biologically incapable of working at current Google? Our female colleagues at HR department are so triggered they literally can't stop crying!"
What's the implication of "There's some roles we can't accomodate to make them more suitable for women" for you (which is literally said in the paper) ?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
No, it's literally just a bunch of lies, which you probably picked up from some fourth-party retelling of the story. Damore sent it as a part of a specific conversation on specific topic, in place specially designated to hold such conversations. And his opponents distributed it with the purpose of silencing him because they disliked what he had to say. It wasn't a "manifesto", it was a document meant for internal discussion, on internal discussion forum, which has been seized and distributed in public by the opponents instead of trying to argue any opposing points.
> I'm sorry you don't get it but most people wouldn't want to work with such a socially maladapted person who could compile all this research
By "most people" you mean "myself and a couple of my friends who I didn't even ask but I am sure I know what they think because we all think the same". Actually, working with a person who bothers to support his opinions with well argued, well searched and well presented research, instead of running to the press crying "witches! there are witches here! burn them all!" is a very pleasant and productive thing. Even if you disagree with such person, at least you can have a civilized discussion, understand and appreciate their arguments and eventually hopefully find common solutions, and you have a reason to expect they'd behave in the same reasonable, professional and civilized manner. On the contrary, working with somebody who would each time you do something they don't like leak it to the hostile press who would sensationalize it and coordinate personal attacks on you would be a complete nightmare.
You value social conformity too highly. No reform can happen if nobody dissents. I guess you're implying that he should have done so by gaining political power first, then exercising that power to share or implement his ideas in a way which would no longer be socially maladaptive because his respected status would give it more perceived value. Probably that would be more successful, but it's not bad for an individual suggest novel ways of working towards the company's stated goals.
I'm sure if you lived in a very religious society, you'd have the same condemnation of anyone who openly questions the Bible. Your concern isn't that he was wrong but that he shouldn't have said things people clearly didn't want to hear. Social conformity is pretty useful at keeping people working cohesively and effectively, but it can go astray and we need people brave enough to fight against it when that happens.
> things they clearly believe
I think this what angered people the most. What he actually wrote was reasonable and factually accurate, however, others who were also socially inept but in a more typical way read between the lines and imagined some other unstated bad ideas must be in his mind. Back when this happened a lot of people were making angry posts about these imagined ideas rather than what he actually wrote. He must believe women are incapable of working in tech, inferior, etc.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.