Their product embodied their values. It turned out that their values are quite radical when exposed to general public. In my opinion, unless there are people and cultural changes - its quite hard to imagine their long term success in this space
I guess though there were unintended consequence where I imagine they're prompting the model with something along the lines of "and remember to be diverse!", and there are obviously some cases where this isn't a good idea. In particular, when the prompt itself is for something that is explicitly racial or where the result is "charged".
E.g., if someone asks for photos of white people, the AI shouldn't generate photos of people that aren't white (and fine, it might return a disclaimer that it only generate white people because you asked it to).
More nuanced though are situations like asking it about historically evil people (e.g., Nazis, as was one of the examples I've seen) but also more benign things like British monarchs or something. I think trying to figure out what kind of results to "inject" diversity into isn't easy though, since it feels like there are many edge cases.
If they want diversity do it by corpus. Get images from Africa and Asia and so on... Feed that to model to get there...
No in that case you'll just have a default. Believing that the default should be diverse/random is imo not a radical view.
But random as in "proportional to an imaginary world that some people want to present as reality" is questionable.
That would be a default. Defaulting to current demographics fitting whatever context is requested (e.g. "a set of US doctors" matching US population demographics) would be an entirely reasonable default, but it would still be a default.
Historically Google had a very simple solution to globally differing expectations about query results: IP or account geolocation. Query personalization by geography is one of the biggest quality wins in web search. Generalizing, an AI built with the same values and ethos as classical Google web search would respond to "Generate a photo of doctors" differently depending on where in the world you asked it from.
That solution also fixes many other cases that aren't third rails, like "Show me a good nearby restaurant serving local food" which you can't solve by attempting to hallucinate a non-existent restaurant that serves a menu of every conceivable dish weighted by population size.
It's unclear why this solution wouldn't resolve all their stated concerns, so we might infer that their actual goals differ from their stated goals. For example, influencing the people who use their services.
If you're in NYC/SF and you search for "generate photos of doctors", you expect to see people of all colors represented. Yet the training data for a lot of this is based off white-centric Anglo-centric media.
"Good restaurant near me"? There's literally a dozen amazing cuisines around.
All this said, I'm actually not a fan of this forced 'diversity' in results. Just show me the data and hope that we'll have more diverse data sources.
> I don't think Google sets the agenda
Soo, you're saying they did not internally test this at all, and delegated that to whoever sets their agenda?
As for whether a single product manager has that level of control over the serving product... query term rewriting has been a google strategy for quite some time and I doubt a single PM really can influence the product this way and still manage to launch, but as I don't work there and am not privy to the internal details of this product's launch, I can't really say.
That the product is full of disrespect for the user, that I agree. I don't envy the paeans trying to get promos by associating their name with gemini internally.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39470029
>From his linkedin: Senior Director of Product in Gemini, VP WeWork, "Advisor" VSCO, VP of advertising products in Pandora, Product Marketing Manager Google+, Business analyst JPMorgan Chase...
"Krawczyk’s official title is senior director of product management for Gemini, the company’s main group of AI models.
Though he’s lowering his public profile, Krawczyk is still engaged in the work on Gemini products and has the same title, according to sources with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named in order to speak on the issue."
surprised he's keeping his job,