Some of the reasoning:
>Preliminary assessment also suggests Imagen encodes several social biases and stereotypes, including an overall bias towards generating images of people with lighter skin tones and a tendency for images portraying different professions to align with Western gender stereotypes. Finally, even when we focus generations away from people, our preliminary analysis indicates Imagen encodes a range of social and cultural biases when generating images of activities, events, and objects. We aim to make progress on several of these open challenges and limitations in future work.
Really sad that breakthrough technologies are going to be withheld due to our inability to cope with the results.
Moreover, the model doing things like exclusively producing white people when asked to create images of people home brewing beer is "biased" but it's a bias that presumably reflects reality (or at least the internet), if not the reality we'd prefer. Bias means more than "spam and crap", in the ML community bias can also simply mean _accurately_ modeling the underlying distribution when reality falls short of the author's hopes.
For example, if you're interested in learning about what home brewing is the fact that it uses white people would be at least a little unfortunate since there is nothing inherently white and some home brewers aren't white. But if, instead, you wanted to just generate typical home brewing images doing anything but would generate conspicuously unrepresentative images.
But even ignoring the part of the biases which are debatable or of application-specific impact, saying something is unfortunate and saying people should be denied access are entirely different things.
I'll happily delete this comment if you can bring to my attention a single person who has suggested that we lose access to the internet because of spam and crap who has also argued that the release of an internet-biased ML model shouldn't be withheld.