Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own.
This week in AI, Google paused its AI chatbot Gemini’s ability to generate images of people after a segment of users complained about historical inaccuracies. Told to depict “a Roman legion,” for instance, Gemini would show an anachronistic, cartoonish group of racially diverse foot soldiers while rendering “Zulu warriors” as Black.
It appears that Google — like some other AI vendors, including OpenAI — had implemented clumsy hardcoding under the hood to attempt to “correct” for biases in its model. In response to prompts like “show me images of only women” or “show me images of only men,” Gemini would refuse, asserting such images could “contribute to the exclusion and marginalization of other genders.” Gemini was also loath to generate images of people identified solely by their race — e.g. “white people” or “black people” — out of ostensible concern for “reducing individuals to their physical characteristics.”
Dispatches From The Front 