zlacker

>>kevema+(OP)
>While we leave an in-depth empirical analysis of social and cultural biases to future work, our small scale internal assessments reveal several limitations that guide our decision not to release our model at this time.

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.

>>daenz+b5
The ironic part is that these "social and cultural biases" are purely from a Western, American lens. The people writing that paragraph are completely oblivious to the idea that there could be other cultures other than the Western American one. In attempting to prevent "encoding of social and cultural biases" they have encoded such biases themselves into their own research.

>>ceeplu+Q5
It seems you've got it backwards: "tendency for images portraying different professions to align with Western gender stereotypes" means that they are calling out their own work precisely because it is skewed in the direction of Western American biases.

>>not2b+N6
The very act of mentioning "western gender stereotypes" starts from a biased position.

Why couldn't they be "northern gender stereotypes"? Is the world best explained as a division of west/east instead of north/south? The northern hemisphere has much more population than the south, and almost all rich countries are in the northern hemisphere. And precisely it's these rich countries pushing the concept of gender stereotypes. In poor countries, nobody cares about these "gender stereotypes".

Actually, the lines dividing the earth into north and south, east and west hemispheres are arbitrary, so maybe they shouldn't mention the word "western" to avoid the propagation of stereotypes about earth regions.

Or why couldn't they be western age stereotypes? Why are there no kids or very old people depicted as nurses?

Why couldn't they be western body shape stereotypes? Why are there so few obese people in the images? Why are there no obese people depicted as athletes?

Are all of these really stereotypes or just natural consequences of natural differences?

>>young_+Wc
The bulk of the trained data is from western technology, images, books, television, movies, photography, media. That's where the very real and recognized biases come from. They're the result of a gap in data nothing more.

Look at how DALL-E 2 produces little bears rather than bear sized bears. Because its data doesn't have a lot of context for how large bears are. So you wind up having to say "very large bear" to DALL-E 2.

Are DALL-E 2 bears just a "natural consequence of natural differences"? Or is the model not reflective of reality?

>>joshcr+gf
That's true for some things, but the "gender bias for some professions" is likely to just be reflecting reality.