I do not dislike AI, in fact, it is quite the opposite, I find the technology fascinating. Yet, we should not be blind of the fact of the general degradation of a number of current models. Both in LLMs and in image generation.
Case in point? The newly released Stable Diffusion 3. It is being heavily ridiculed, and why? Well, upon given commands to create a Human image, there is a non-trivial chance you will be presented with an outright deformed monstrosity. Give it is try!
Examples of which I simply could not post here for fear of getting this very post banned due to it being highly inappropriate on this site, however tamer examples can be found on this link. All resembling a creature more keenly found in a 70’s or 80’s horror movie. The leading cause seems to be Censorship.
You may remember the case where Google’s AI created images of Black and Asian people in Nazi uniform when prompted for pictures of Historical Nazis, thanks to the developer’s obsession with diversity and inclusion. Including photos of Black American, Indigenous people wearing an eagle feather crown headdress. As such, in our strangely paradoxical-leaning puritan society, “good” Censorship and shareholder value, have become an undercurrent that has permeated into everything, from language, general interactions to AI models. The reality is that when censorship happens to a society at this scale, we all lose.
In an attempt to train their IA, so as to not create the possibility of NSFW content, data sets, in this case of Human Anatomy, offensive or not, were filtered out from its training, hampering it. Who knew you need Human models in order to create Human images? Despite the at times impressive results we might be able to achieve from these models, in the end, the secret sauce behind them is a complex marriage between large amounts of data sets and statistics. If we remove or pull the strings on these, the result can and will be very, at the very least, unexpected.
In the end, all of these companies have bottom lines, very expensive energy and server farm bills at the end of the month or shareholders they need to answer to. Thus it is fascinating to witness the race by companies like Meta, Google, Apple and others tripping over themselves as they tinker, doing the equivalent of brain surgery on their models in the hope that what comes out the other side of the black-box is profitable in the long term.
Since apparently, the AI in this case, came to the conclusion that anything humanoid was NSFW. So, logically, deformed horrifying monsters beyond Human comprehension are now humans, too. At least to Stable Diffusion’ s latest product.
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