Meta AI is obsessed with turbans when generating images of Indian men

I think you're looking at it wrong. The prompt is to make an image of someone who is recognizable as Indian. The turban is indicative clothing of that heritage and therefore will cause the subject to be more recognizable as Indian to someone else. The current rate at which Indian people wear turbans isn't necessarily the correct statistic to look at.

What do you picture when you think, a guy from Texas? Are they wearing a hat? What kind? What percentage of Texans actually wear that specific hat that you might be thinking of?

I think the idea is that it's what makes a person "an Indian" and not something else.

Only a minority of Indians wear turbans, but more Indians than other people wear turbans. So if someone's wearing a turban, then that person is probably Indian.

I'm not saying that's true necessarily (though it may be), but that's how the AI interprets it...or how pictures get tagged.

It's like with Canadians and maple leaves. Most Canadians aren't wearing maple leaf stuff, but I wouldn't be surprised if an AI added maple leaves to an image of "a Canadian".

Imagine a German man from Bavaria... You just thought of a man wearing Lederhosen and holding a beer, didn't you? Would you be surprised if I told you that they usually don't look like that outside of a festival?

A traditional dress is not a religious dress, it's a dress used for a long time for it's usefulness or fashion.

The historical use of the turban is fascinating, spanning for millennia and in a lot of regions and ethnic groups of the world.

I suggest the wiki page for further info, more precise than I have on hand.

An excerpt about the Pagri:

In Rajasthan state of India these turbans, known as Pagri or Safa, is a traditional headwear that is an integral part of the state’s cultural identity.

My point was (but it might be lost in sarcasm) that being the "hat" of Indian kings, nobles and emperors for millennia, we have a lot of drawings and also photos of Indian people with turbans, that most probably these generative models have been trained on.

On a footnote: why should the concept of a traditional dress be offensive? A lot of human groups have one.

Edit these are the words most associated with "Pagri" in english. It's a matter of data.

What's the data that the model is being fed? What percentage of imaging featuring Indian men are tagged as such? What percentage of imaging featuring men wearing Turbans are tagged as Indian Men? Are there any images featuring Pakistan men wearing Turbans? Even if only a minority of Indian feature Turbans, if that's the only distinction between Indian and Pakistan men in the model data, the model will favor Turbans for Indian Men. That's just a hypothetical explanation.

You don't think nearly 1/6th is statistically significant? What's the lower bound on significance as you see things?

To be clear, it's obviously dumb for their generative system to be overrepresenting turbans like this, although it's likely to be a bias in the inputs rather than something the system came up with itself, I just think that 5% is generally enough to be considered significant and calling three times that not significant confuses me.

Except if they trained it on something that has a large proportion of turban wearers. It is only as good as the data fed to it, so if there was a bias, it’ll show the bias. Yet another reason this really isn’t “AI”

Put in western or Texas and that's what you get, the west is a huge area even just of America but the word is linked to a lot of movie tropes and stuff so that's what you get.

This is also only when the language is English, ask in urdu or Bengali and you get totally different results, in fact just use urdu instead of Indian and get less turbans or put in Punjabi and you'll get more turbuns.

Or just put turban in the negatives if you want

I see you've watched anime featuring Americans.

Ask an AI for pictures of Texans and see how many cowboy hats it gives back to you.

Does it help the model to produce images that are indoubtably "american" for it's raters or for it's automated rating system? If yes they are statistically significant. Low frequency and systematic rarity can be both significant in a statistical analysis.

Are you sure?

Maybe you are confusing "traditional" with "religious".

Pick up a dictionary, or even better, an encyclopedia.

Pre-independence, most Indian males had some sort of headgear. E.g. look at any old photos of Bombay

You're wrong.

It just means there's a bias in the data that is probably being amplified during training.

It answers what's relevant according to its training.

Please remember what the A in AI stands for.

Yes but the gentlemen in the images are also sikhs

glances at the current policies of the Indian government

Well... for now, anyway.

Careful, the next generated image is gonna contain a windmill with clogs for blades

I'm guessing this relates to training data. Most training data that contains skin cancer is probably coming from medical sources and would have a ruler measuring the size of the melanoma, etc. So if you ask it to generate an image it's almost always going to contain a ruler. Depending on the training data I could see generating the opposite as well, ask for a ruler and it includes skin cancer.

I call everything technology

It definitely can be racist it just can't be held responsible as it just regurgitates.

Stereotypes are everywhere