this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
97 points (73.4% liked)

Technology

59219 readers
2637 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

The student ended up with a fairer complexion, dark blonde hair and blue eyes after her Playground AI request

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] cerevant 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The bias isn’t in the software, it is in the data. The stock photos of professional women that were fed in were white.

That doesn’t say anything about the AI, but rather the community that created those biases.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I recall a somewhat similar incident when I was showing an in-law of mine how Stable Diffusion worked a while back. She's of Indian descent, and she asked Stable Diffusion to generate a picture of an Indian woman. All of the women it generated had Bindis and other "traditional" Indian cultural garb on, and she was initially kind of annoyed by that. But I explained that that's because most of the photos of women in the training set that were explicitly tagged as Indian were dressed that way, whereas the rest of the Indian women in the training set probably weren't explicitly tagged. They were just women.

It was kind of interesting trying to figure out which option was more biased. Realizing that there was an understandable reason behind that helped ease her annoyance.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, but they trained on easily accessible data in large amounts. Which actually says that stock photo websites are the biased ones there.

No model can be trained on an equal amount of diverse data for everyone, and it's not supposed to anyway. I bet it was hardly if at all trained on Mongolian goat herders, but you could hardly say it's biased against them, just that there wasn't an easily accessible large amount of pictures of them.

[–] cerevant 2 points 1 year ago

That’s my point. The AI isn’t an independent subject to be criticized, it is a cultural mirror.