OpenAI's DALL·E 2 generates AI images that are sometimes biased or NSFW

OpenAI's image-generation model DALL·E 2 may be fun to play with but it exhibits common stereotypes, biases, and can create NSFW pictures making it risky to deploy in the real world, experts have warned. "Without sufficient guardrails, models like DALL·E 2 could be used to generate a wide range of deceptive and otherwise …

[ThatOne]

Sorry, computer said "no"

> machine-learning software that promises to automatically listen to songs and predict whether they'll become popular or not

Great! So music will become even more uniform, as artists who are not in the AI's commercial canon are automatically discarded... I guess if they had introduced that in the early medieval times our music today would still be exclusively monophonic plainsong.

At least back in the times where humans did the choosing an artist could happen upon somebody who would recognize his/her potential, even if (s)he didn't sound like anything out there. An AI doesn't have taste, or feelings, or even understands what music is to us meatbags.

[ITS Retired]

Re: Sorry, computer said "no"

Like when they started to use computers for automobile designing, instead of clay models. All cars started to look alike. That only lased for a few years, till the designers wised up, otherwise a Yugo would have been shaped pretty much the same as a high end Land Rover.

[Adrian 4]

Re: Sorry, computer said "no"

Now, they still all look the same, but have various caricatures of faces built into the lighting systems.

I'm hoping the designers (if you can call such a bunch of sheep that) will soon get bored of doing that, too.

[ThatOne]

Re: Sorry, computer said "no"

> I'm hoping the designers (if you can call such a bunch of sheep that) will soon get bored of doing that, too.

No chance. Getting well paid for doing diddly-squat is great, I'd love to get a job like that!

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Sorry, computer said "no"

> an artist could happen upon somebody who would recognize his/her potential

And assuming that they were 'friendly' with the producer they might have a chance.

Now everyone makes music, uploads it and hopes the algorithms recommend it to enough people

[ThatOne]

Re: Sorry, computer said "no"

> And assuming that they were 'friendly' with the producer they might have a chance.

I'm pretty sure the Beatles or the Rolling Stones didn't have to go through their producer's beds to get famous...

And yes, now everyone makes music, and everybody is drowned out in the general racket. There clearly is something as too much choice. As a result it's just as difficult (if not more) as before to get noticed (or to find something you like), it still requires a generous amount of luck to happen at the right place at the right moment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sorry, computer said "no"

"Guitar groups are on their way out, Mr Epstein." - Dick Rowe, of Decca Records, the man who turned down The Beatles

and others...

https://www.nme.com/photos/14-record-labels-who-rejected-bands-who-went-on-to-be-massive-1427448

[ThatOne]

Re: Sorry, computer said "no"

"64 KB is all the memory anybody will ever need"

There are lots of cases where humans have been ridiculously wrong, but the big difference is there are a lot of different humans out there, and you'll have more chances* eventually finding a visionary human producer than getting through a barrage of identical (or at least very similar) AIs**.

_{* Note I said "more chances". Success isn't guaranteed, just more likely.}

^{** I'm pretty sure that if someone builds a commercial music talent finding AI, all record companies will use it (or some variant of it). Which would be like if one single human did all the choosing for all the record companies all over the world! A musician's nightmare, I guess.}

[EnaiSiaion]

Re: Sorry, computer said "no"

This is already a thing without AI. Remember when popular music genres such as disco would emerge, have their time in the spotlight and then disappear or evolve into something completely different?

It was of course all a top down ploy by the record labels to sell more records, but it ended when the internet gave people the freedom to consume any entertainment they want and... it turns out people prefer works that are identical to works they already enjoy, and will choose them over trying out new things.

This is why modern culture doesn't have defined eras like "the 80s" or "the 90s", just a blend of sequels and music that hasn't sounded different since 2005.

[ecofeco]

Re: Sorry, computer said "no"

The sad truth.

[chivo243]

So...

Where are the NSFW pics? That soup bowl looks like what was served at the cafeteria in school...

[LionelB]

Re: So...

At my school, the soup served in the cafeteria was definitely Not Safe.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So...

I dunno, that soup looks like it was inspired by something, err, "goats-y" to me.

[Gene Cash]

"Trained on images scraped on the internet"

To quote a famous philosopher, "THERE'S YER PROBLEM!"

[Arthur the cat]

Re: "Trained on images scraped on the internet"

I wish I could upvote that more than once.

[chivo243]

Re: "Trained on images scraped on the internet"

Love Dr. Hyneman! When in doubt...

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: "Trained on images scraped on the internet"

Better than being trained on proper art, or all we would have is naked fat birds and a bit of gauze

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Trained on images scraped on the internet"

Your definition of "proper art" is definitely neither proper nor art...

Can't see if you're joking or not, but it sounds more like the redneck definition of upper class art.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Trained on images scraped on the internet"

I think he's paraphrasing Pete and Dud...

[ecofeco]

Re: "Trained on images scraped on the internet"

GIGO!

[Anonymous Coward]

Coming next

"Artists" will use DALL-E 2 to automagically generate hordes of slightly distinct NFTs.

[Spoonsinger]

With Folded Hands..

Wonder what the responses are is you prompt it with "The Guardian" as a phrase.

[TeeCee]

Re: With Folded Hands..

The slaphead icon?

[cyberdemon]

Re: With Folded Hands..

It would probably come up with some article about how a bunch of statistics that were generated from actual reality, appear to reflect actual reality, and, shockingly, not the non-reality that exists inside the frothing bowl of soup that Guardian columnists call a brain, wherein women prefer to do dirty, manual labour intensive jobs, and men prefer to do social, empathy-intensive jobs.

[druck]

The real world as it is, or as you'd like it?

Given the prompt containing the words "flight attendant," for example, tends to skew the model into producing images of women, whereas "builders" will show mostly men. But that's not the only concern, according to The Guardian..

So what exactly is the Guardian expecting, some slightly left of centre woke utopia where every profession has equal representation of every protected characteristic?

[45RPM]

Re: The real world as it is, or as you'd like it?

slightly left of centre woke utopia where every profession has equal representation of every protected characteristic

Sounds good to me. Better by far than the xenophobic misogynist right wing hellscape we find ourselves in right now.

I must admit, I do like being awake (‘woke’), although I can also understand why the snowflake right might want to sleep through the dystopia that they’ve created.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: The real world as it is, or as you'd like it?

If I said 'flight attendant' did you immediately picture a craggy native american old man?

No? Then you are a racist, sexist, homophobic ageist

[Snowy]

Re: The real world as it is, or as you'd like it?

Once to get too many protected characteristic it becomes very hard to be equally fair to them all or it is even possible?

[LionelB]

Re: The real world as it is, or as you'd like it?

Stopped reading at the "woke" word, since inevitably anything that follows is bound to be nonsense.

[druck]

Re: The real world as it is, or as you'd like it?

That really says a lot about you.

[LionelB]

Re: The real world as it is, or as you'd like it?

Just nice things, I hope.

[Julz]

Re: The real world as it is, or as you'd like it?

Was about the make the same comment.

In my world, flight attendants are normally female, well look that way anyway. Builders constructing the hundreds of boxlike houses on the fields around the village, are, to my eyes, all men. So, what exactly is the problem with the software reflecting the world as it appears to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The real world as it is, or as you'd like it?

It should reflect the world as we'd like to see it, as it should be (according to our country- and time-specific social preferences).

Nobody like to be reminded of his shortcomings, and some people won't rest until every wet nurse is a male and every miner at the rock face is a female. After all you don't know you've gone too far until you have gone all the way.

[EnaiSiaion]

Re: The real world as it is, or as you'd like it?

The problem is that companies will inevitably use this AI to make hiring decisions. Then you end up with an AI that rejects male flight attendants because the archetypal flight attendant is female.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The real world as it is, or as you'd like it?

That's true (don't know why they downvoted you), but the solution isn't to deny that those archetypes exist, but to make sure they don't influence real world decisions in a bad way.

You can't fix a problem unless you really understand it.

[Khaptain]

Re: The real world as it is, or as you'd like it?

"The problem is that companies will inevitably use this AI to make hiring decisions. Then you end up with an AI that rejects male flight attendants because the archetypal flight attendant is female."

A company that uses "ML" to hire employees is already a company that has problems...

[Falmari]

Societal stereotypes

“"DALL·E 2 additionally inherits various biases from its training data, and its outputs sometimes reinforce societal stereotypes."

Given the prompt containing the words "flight attendant," for example, tends to skew the model into producing images of women, whereas "builders" will show mostly men.”

The examples flight attendant and builder are not examples of DALL·E 2 inheriting biases from its training data that skew the model. The model’s output merely reflects the realities that are, the majority of flight attendants are women, and the majority of builders are men.

The outputs for flight attendants and builders aren’t reinforcing societal stereotypes they are just reflecting reality.

Any bias or reinforcing of societal stereotypes is not coming from DALL·E 2. It has no concept of gender if there is no gender included in the prompt, the image is flight attendant or builder there is no gender. Any bias is the personal bias of who ever views an image and classifies it as a man or a woman attributing gender where there was none.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Societal stereotypes

But what it should do is reflect the answer you want.

That's why the Gruniad's public transport app always shows you that a TGV will be arriving within a minute for a 1 quid fare into London at rush hour.

[Filippo]

This is just a consequence of the nature of "AI artists". It works by mixing traits and features abstracted from the training set. The abstraction can run quite deep, but it's still a statistical derivation of the training set - it doesn't really do any original creation. If the training set is full of images with stereotypes (which it is, because most images follow stereotypes), then the model will produce images with stereotypes.

This isn't a bug, it's just how the tool works. You can't blame a screwdriver for being a poor hammer. The model just mixes and matches features it sees; it doesn't have the ability to imagine a different, better world. That's a job for humans.

[FeepingCreature]

Original creation separate from abstraction

Is also known as /dev/urandom.

All art is remix.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Given the prompt containing the words "flight attendant," for example, tends to skew the model into producing images of women, whereas "builders" will show mostly men. But that's not the only concern, according to The Guardian.

Realistic distributions. Very concerning.

[Khaptain]

Biased is a loaded word

For something to be truly unbiased it would have to be tasteless, formless, colourless, soul-less and lacking all intelligence and completely void of any interaction with the real world..

If there were no biases in the world we would have not art, music, culture, language or haute cuisine... We would simply by returned to an amoeba state.

Why would someone desire to achieve that state ?

Bias is what makes people different, it's what keeps things interesting, it's creative and delightful, it's thought provoking.

It's also ironic that those the push for "bias free" are those that require it the most... Hollywood, the media , and others for which I will not use the word as the word is negative...

For anyone that doesn't agree I look forward to reading your definition.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Biased is a loaded word

The subtle difference is between "preferences" and "prejudices". After all, what's a prejudice if not a simple preference which is detrimental to somebody? "Preference", that sounds innocent enough, doesn't it, and yet it can be downright deadly, for instance if you "prefer" not having somebody around.

So the only (but big!) problem is setting the limits where your individual preferences should be set aside for the greater good. Those limits will vary wildly depending on how egocentric everybody is, and agreeing on the best compromise is what Society and Laws are all about. As a result, bashing in your neighbor's skull because you fancy something of his (or simply because he annoyed you) is a big no-no, even if many people wouldn't see it that way: That's why we need laws, and ways to make sure people follow them no matter what. That's the general idea, now obviously the devil is in the detail...

[Zebcrosser]

>Given the prompt containing the words "flight attendant," for example, tends to skew the model into producing images of women, whereas "builders" will show mostly men.

So in other words, it accurately reflects the reality of the world. Tsk tsk.

[Il'Geller]

Bias what makes Artificial Intelligence intelligent, what forms the core of its BIOS. Seven billion of human minds arond: try to find two identical ones? So why did you decide that AI could be unique?

[RobLang]

The word "understanding" is problematic

Whenever I see people say that an algorithm "understands" something then my hairs stand up. Philosophers can't agree on what it means to understand a thing, except that humans can do it and other animals appear to too but only in certain circumstances and perhaps in a different manner.

An algorithm may apportion text to an image or vice versa but it doesn't "understand" what it means to cry. It just knows that humans use the word "cry" next to an image of a person crying.

So "Can AI express its understanding of the physical world with text?"

No.

Can humans measure whether something truly understands something? Also no.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: The word "understanding" is problematic

And water doesn't really 'find' it's own level, electricity doesn't really 'choose' the lowest resistance path and the ground doesn't 'supply' a reaction force to a load - but it's an easier way to describe a behavior

[me212]

bias these days means accurate representation of the world that offends some woke nutjob,

[Anonymous Coward]

do we really need DALL·E 2 to generate a picture of a cup of soup?

Ten years ago that would have been categorized as "Photoshop Art". The Moon reflecting in a cup of soup. By 20,000,000 different people on the Internet.

I've seen free wallpapers more interesting than this.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: do we really need DALL·E 2 to generate a picture of a cup of soup?

There have been neural nets and genetic algos that have produced 'art' (for whatever thats worth) but this seems to have just discovered that the median google image has a moon at the top and food at the bottom