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.
We certainly don't want to perpetuate harmful stereotypes. But is it a flaw that the model encodes the world as it really is, statistically, rather than as we would like it to be? By this I mean that there are more light-skinned people in the west than dark, and there are more women nurses than men, which is reflected in the model's training data. If the model only generates images of female nurses, is that a problem to fix, or a correct assessment of the data?
If some particular demographic shows up in 51% of the data but 100% of the model's output shows that one demographic, that does seem like a statistics problem that the model could correct by just picking less likely "next token" predictions.
Also, is it wrong to have localized models? For example, should a model for use in Japan conform to the demographics of Japan, or to that of the world?
Does a bias towards lighter skin represent reality? I was under the impression that Caucasians are a minority globally.
I read the disclaimer as "the model does NOT represent reality".
For example, the most eaten foods globally are maize, rice, wheat, cassava, etc. If it always depicted foods matching the global statistics, it wouldn't be giving most users what they expected from their prompt. American users would usually expect American foods, Japanese users would expect Japanese foods, etc.
> Does a bias towards lighter skin represent reality? I was under the impression that Caucasians are a minority globally.
Caucasians specifically are a global minority, but lighter skinned people are not, depending of course on how dark you consider skin to be "lighter skin". Most of the world's population is in Asia, so I guess a model that was globally statistically accurate would show mostly people from there.