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‘We definitely messed up’: why did Google AI tool make offensive historical images?
(www.theguardian.com)
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If you create an image generator that always returns clean cut white men whenever you ask it to produce a "doctor" or a "business man", but only ever spits out black when when you ask for a picture of someone cleaning, your PR department is going to have a bad time.
And even worse, it actually reinforces that image within users.
Corporations making AI tools available to the general public are under a ton of scrutiny right now and are kinda in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. At the other extreme, if they completely uncensored it, the big controversial story would be that pedophiles are generating images of child porn or some other equally heinous shit.
These are the inevitable growing pains of a new industry with a ton of hype and PR behind it.
TBH it's just a byproduct of the "everything is a service, nothing is a product" age of the industry. Google is responsible for what random people do with their products.