[bufbupa]

At the end of a day, if you ask for a nurse, should the model output a male or female by default? If the input text lacks context/nuance, then the model must have some bias to infer the user's intent. This holds true for any image it generates; not just the politically sensitive ones. For example, if I ask for a picture of a person, and don't get one with pink hair, is that a shortcoming of the model?

I'd say that bias is only an issue if it's unable to respond to additional nuance in the input text. For example, if I ask for a "male nurse" it should be able to generate the less likely combination. Same with other races, hair colors, etc... Trying to generate a model that's "free of correlative relationships" is impossible because the model would never have the infinitely pedantic input text to describe the exact output image.

[slg]

This type of bias sounds a lot easier to explain away as a non-issue when we are using "nurse" as the hypothetical prompt. What if the prompt is "criminal", "rapist", or some other negative? Would that change your thought process or would you be okay with the system always returning a person of the same race and gender that statistics indicate is the most likely? Do you see how that could be a problem?

[tines]

Not the person you responded to, but I do see how someone could be hurt by that, and I want to avoid hurting people. But is this the level at which we should do it? Could skewing search results, i.e. hiding the bias of the real world, give us the impression that everything is fine and we don't need to do anything to actually help people?

I have a feeling that we need to be real with ourselves and solve problems and not paper over them. I feel like people generally expect search engines to tell them what's really there instead of what people wish were there. And if the engines do that, people can get agitated!

I'd almost say that hurt feelings are prerequisite for real change, hard though that may be.

These are all really interesting questions brought up by this technology, thanks for your thoughts. Disclaimer, I'm a fucking idiot with no idea what I'm talking about.

[rpmisms]

It's an unfortunate reflection of reality. There are three possible outcomes:

1. The model provides a reflection of reality, as politically inconvenient and hurtful as it may be.

2. The model provides an intentionally obfuscated version with either random traits or non correlative traits.

3. The model refuses to answer.

Which of these is ideal to you?

[true_religion]

Cultural biases aren’t uniform across nations. If a prompt returns caucasians for nurses, and other races for criminals then most people in my country would not note that as racism simply because there are not, and there have never in history, been enough caucasians resident for anyone to create significant race theories about them.

This is a far cry from say the USA where that would instantly trigger a response since until the 1960s there was a widespread race based segregation.

[karpierz]

> At the end of a day, if you ask for a nurse, should the model output a male or female by default?

Randomly pick one.

> Trying to generate a model that's "free of correlative relationships" is impossible because the model would never have the infinitely pedantic input text to describe the exact output image.

Sure, and you can never make a medical procedure 100% safe. Doesn't mean that you don't try to make them safer. You can trim the obvious low hanging fruit though.

[pxmpxm]

> Randomly pick one.

How does the model back out the "certain people would like to pretend it's a fair coin toss that a randomly selected nurse is male or female" feature?

It won't be in any representative training set, so you're back to fishing for stock photos on getty rather than generating things.

[calvinmorrison]

what if I asked the model to show me a sunday school photograph of baptists in the National Baptist Convention?

[nmfisher]

What about preschool teacher?

I say this because I’ve been visiting a number of childcare centres over the past few days and I still have yet to see a single male teacher.

[webmaven]

> If the input text lacks context/nuance, then the model must have some bias to infer the user's intent. This holds true for any image it generates; not just the politically sensitive ones. For example, if I ask for a picture of a person, and don't get one with pink hair, is that a shortcoming of the model?

You're ignoring that these models are stochastic. If I ask for a nurse and always get an image of a woman in scrubs, then yes, the model exhibits bias. If I get a male nurse half the time, we can say the model is unbiased WRT gender, at least. The same logic applies to CEOs always being old white men, criminals always being Black men, and so on. Stochastic models can output results that when aggregated exhibit a distribution from which we can infer bias or the lack thereof.

[sangnoir]

> At the end of a day, if you ask for a nurse, should the model output a male or female by default?

This depends on the application. As an example, it would be a problem if it's used as a CV-screening app that's implicitly down-ranking male-applicants to nurse positions, resulting in fewer interviews for them.

[pshc]

Perhaps to avoid this issue, future versions of the model would throw an error like “bias leak: please specify a gender for the nurse at character 32”