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‘Embarrassing and wrong’: Google admits it lost control of image-generating AI

Google has apologized (or come very close to apologizing) for another embarrassing AI blunder this week, an image generating model that injected diversity

It was also, predictably, roped into the ongoing debate about diversity, equity, and inclusion (currently at a reputational local minimum), and seized by pundits as evidence of the woke mind virus further penetrating the already liberal tech sector. But as anyone with any familiarity with the tech could tell you, and as Google explains in its rather abject little apology-adjacent post today, this problem was the result of a quite reasonable workaround for systemic bias in training data. The entire LLM ecosystem is built on implicit instructions — system prompts, as they are sometimes called, where things like “be concise,” “don’t swear,” and other guidelines are given to the model before every conversation.

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