I think this makes a bit of sense though doesn't it? They wrote "guy". Given that training data is probably predominantly white "guy" would give you a white guy nine times out of ten without clarification of what the word means to the AI, i.e. ethnically ambiguous. Because that's what guy is, ethnically ambiguous. The spelling is because DALL-E suuuuucks at text, but slowly getting better at least.
But they should 100% tweak it so that when a defined character is asked for stuff like that gets dropped. I think the prompt structure is what makes this one slip through. Had they put quotes around "guy with swords pointed at him" to clearly mark that as it's own thing this wouldn't have happened.
But I don't think the software can differentiate between the ideas of defined and undefined characters. It's all just association between words and aesthetics, right? It can't know that "Homer Simpson" is a more specific subject than "construction worker" because there's no actual conceptualization happening about what these words mean.
I can't imagine a way to make the tweak you're asking for that isn't just a database of every word or phrase that refers to a specific known individual that the users' prompts get checked against and I can't imagine that'd be worth the time it'd take to create.
If they're inserting random race words in, presumably there's some kind of preprocessing of the prompt going on. That preprocessor is what would need to know if the character is specific enough to not apply the race words.
ChatGPT was just able to parse a list of fictional characters out of concepts, nouns, and historical figures.
It wasn’t perfect, but if it can take the prompt and check if any mention of a fictional or even defined historical character is in there it could be made to not apply additional tags to the prompt.
It's not, the underlying data is still just as biased. Taking a bunch of white people and saying they are "ethnically ambiguous" is just statistical blackface.
I agree with you, but there is a lot of gray area. What about Spider-man? 95% of the pictures it ingests are probably Peter Parker so it would have a strong bias towards making him white when there are several ethnicities that might apply. What about Katniss Everdeen? Is she explicitly white in the book or is she just white because she's played by a white actress? I truly don't know so maybe that is a bad example. What about Santa? What about Jesus? Of all characters, Jesus absolutely shouldn't be white but I'll bet the vast majority of AI depicts him that way.
I'm not disagreeing with you so much as I'm pointing out the line isn't really all that clear. I don't like this ham-handed way of going about it, but I agree with and support the goal of making sure the output isn't white biased just because preserved history tends to be.
The tech is already unreliable and that's not a problem.There has been so many prompts generated and this issue has only arose a few times. If you want a white guy just add white guy to the prompt. When I put this exact prompt into dalle I do not get a black Homer.
If you were really curious about the answer, you practically gave yourself the right search term there: "racial bias in general purpose LLM" and you'll find answers.
However, like your question is phrased, you just seem to be trolling (= secretly disagreeing and pretending to wanting to know, just to then object).
I don't like the idea of a prompt being subtly manipulated like this to "force" inclusion. Instead the training data should be augmented and the AI re-trained on a more inclusive dataset.
The prompt given by the user shouldn't be prefixed or suffixed by additional words, sentences or phrases; except to remind the AI what it is not allowed to generate.
Instead of forcing "inclusivity" on the end user in such a manner; we should instead allow the user to pick skin tone preferences in an easy to understand manner, and allow the AI to process that signal as a part of it's natural prompt.
Obviously; where specific characters are concerned, the default skin tone of the character named in the prompt should be encoded and respected. If multiple versions of that character exist, it should take a user's skin tone output selection into account and select the closest matching version.
If the prompt is requesting a skin tone alteration of a character; that prompt should obviously be honored as well, and executed with the requested skin tone; and not the skin tone setting selection. As an example I can select "Prefer ligher skin tones" in the UI and still request that the AI should generate me a "darker skinned version" of a typically fairer skinned character.
Instead of focusing on forcing "diversity" into prompts that didn't ask for it; let's just make sure that the AI has the full range of human traits available to it to pull from.
Yes. But this would probably cause friction with the overall public, as the AI would then give a full range of human traits, but people would still expect very narrow default outputs. And thinking more about it, what is the full range of human traits anyways? Does such a thing exist? Can we access it? Like, if we only looked at the societies the AI is present in, we still don't get all the people to actually be documented for AI to be trained upon. That's partially the cause for the racist bias of AI in the first place, isn't it? Because white cishet ablebodied people are proportionally much more frequently depicted in media.
If you gave the AI a prompt, e.g. "a man with a hat". What would you expect a good AI to produce? You have a myriad of choices to make and a machine, i.e. the AI, will not be able to make all these choices by itself. Will the result be a black person? Visibly queer or trans? In a wheelchair?
I guess the problem really is, there is no default output for anything. But when people draw something then they so have a default option ready in their mind because of societal biases and personal experiences. So I would probably draw a white cishet man with a boring hat if I were to execute that prompt. Because I'm unfortunately heavily biased, like we all are. And an AI, based on our biases, would draw the same.
But repeating the question from before, what would we expect a "fair" and "neutral" AI to draw? This is really tricky. In the meantime your solution is probably good, i.e. training the AI with more diverse data.
(Oh and I ignored the whole celebrity or known people thingy, your solution is definitely the way to go.)
IMHO one of the biggest mistakes in the Simpsons was adding non-yellow skin tones. "Yellow is white, but brown is brown"... should've stuck with yellow for everyone, green for alien, and could have added some blue. As it is, OP's image is a "white" guy (yellow hand) in blackface.