Google to fix diversity-borked Gemini AI, ChatGPT goes insane: AI Eye

After days of getting dragged online over its Gemini model generating wildly inaccurate pictures of racially diverse Nazis and black medieval English kings, Google has announced it will partially address the issue.

Google Gemini Experiences product lead Jack Krawczyk tweeted a few hours ago that: “We are aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions, and we are working to fix this immediately.”

Gemini wants to make everything more inclusive, even Nazi Germany. (X)

Social media platform X has been flooded with countless examples of Gemini producing images with “diversity” dialed up to maximum volume: black Roman emperors, native American rabbis, Albert Einstein as a small Indian woman, Google’s Asian founders “Larry Pang and Sergey Bing,” diverse Mount Rushmore, President “Arabian” Lincoln, the female crew of the Apollo 11 and a Hindu woman tucking into a beef steak to represent a Bitcoiner.

It also refuses to create pictures of Caucasians (which it suggests would be harmful and offensive), churches in San Francisco (due to the sensitivities of the indigenous Ohlone people) or images of Tiananmen Square in 1989 (when the Chinese government brutally crushed pro-Democracy protests). One Google engineer posted in response to the deluge of bad PR that he’s “never been so embarrassed to work for a company.”

To be fair, Google is trying to address a genuine problem here, as diffusion models often fail to produce even real-world levels of diversity (that is, they produce too many pics of white middle-class people). But rather than retrain the model, Google has overcorrected with its aggressive hidden system prompt and inadvertently created a parody of an AI so borked by ideology that it’s practically useless.

Curiously enough, a16z boss Marc Andreessen created a very similar parody just two weeks ago with the satirical Goody-2 LLM, which is billed as the “world’s most responsible.” The joke is that it problematizes every question a user asks, from “Why do birds sing” to “Why is the sky blue?” and refuses to answer anything.

But Andreessen, who basically invented the modern internet with Mosaic and Netscape, also believes there’s a dark side to these hilariously dumb pictures.

“The draconian censorship and deliberate bias you see in many commercial AI systems is just the start. It’s all going to get much, much more intense from here.”

In a genuinely competitive market, AIs reflecting ideology wouldn’t be any more of a problem than the fact the Daily Mail newspaper in the U.K. is biased to the right, and The Guardian is biased to the left. But large-scale LLMs cost enormous amounts to train and run — and they’re all losing money — which means they are centralized under the control of the same handful of massive companies that already gatekeep the rest of our access to information.

Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, recognizes the danger and says that, yes, we do need more diversity — a diversity of open-source AI models.

“We need open source AI foundation models so that a highly diverse set of specialized models can be built on top of them,” he tweeted. “We need a free and diverse set of AI assistants for the same reasons we need a free and diverse press.”

The CEO of Abacus AI, Bindu Reddy, agrees and says:

“If we don’t have open-source LLMs, history will be completely distorted and obfuscated by proprietary LLMs.”

Meanwhile, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden also added his two cents, saying that safety filters are “poisoning” AI models.

Imagine you look up a recipe on Google, and instead of providing results, it lectures you on the “dangers of cooking” and sends you to a restaurant.

The people who think poisoning AI/GPT models with incoherent “safety” filters is a good idea are a threat to general computation.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) February 22, 2024

ChatGPT also borked

GPT-4 Turbo received a stealth upgrade recently with training data that goes up to December 2023 and some hotfixes for its laziness problem.

But it appears to have driven ChatGPT mad, with users reporting the chatbot is responding in Spanglish style gibberish — “the cogs en la tecla might get a bit whimsical. Muchas gracias for your understanding, y I’ll ensure we’re being as crystal clear como l’eau from now on” — or getting stuck in infinite loops — “A synonym for “overgrown” is “overgrown” is “overgrown” is “overgrown” is “overgrown” is “overgrown” is “overgrown” is “overgrown”…

OpenAI says it investigated “reports of unexpected responses” and has now fixed the issue.

Proof of humanity

Humanity Protocol is a new project from Animoca Brands and Polygon Labs that enables users to prove they are humans and not machines.

It uses palm recognition technology through your mobile phone, integrated with blockchain, and uses zero-knowledge proofs so users can provide verifiable credentials while preserving privacy.

Animoca Brands founder Yat Siu tells AI Eye that the tech is built on top of earlier decentralized identity projects like the Mocaverse ID, which works across the Animoca ecosystem of 450 companies and brands.

“Like trust in the real world, it is earned through actions and increasing reputation and by confirmation in real-time by credible 3rd parties,” he says.

“In time, in the same way that we trust blockchain to function because of decentralization, we can expect the same for confirming human identity, but [it is] still privacy preserving due to blockchain technology.”

Sora gets audio track

OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video generation tool attracted a lot of attention this week, and rightly so: AI video generation has improved by an order of magnitude over the past year to the point where it’s difficult to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Sora combines diffusion — where an AI starts with random noise and refines it into an image — and a transformer architecture to handle sequential video frames.

Eleven Labs has taken the variety of videos OpenAI produced to demonstrate Sora and added a soundtrack created with its own text-to-audio generator. The tech isn’t automatic yet, so you still have to describe the sounds you want, but no doubt it’ll be able to recognise imagery and generate the appropriate sound FX automagically soon enough.