LW - The Gemini Incident Continues by Zvi

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Gemini Incident Continues, published by Zvi on February 28, 2024 on LessWrong.
Previously: The Gemini Incident (originally titled Gemini Has a Problem)
The fallout from The Gemini Incident continues.
Also the incident continues. The image model is gone. People then focused on the text model. The text model had its own related problems, some now patched and some not.
People are not happy. Those people smell blood. It is a moment of clarity.
Microsoft even got in on the act, as we rediscover how to summon Sydney.
There is a lot more to discuss.
The Ultimate New York Times Reaction
First off, I want to give a shout out to The New York Times here, because wow, chef's kiss. So New York Times. Much pitchbot.
Dominic Cummings: true art from NYT, AI can't do this yet
This should be in the dictionary as the new definition of Chutzpah.
Do you see what The New York Times did there?
They took the fact that Gemini systematically refused to create images of white people in most circumstances, including historical circumstances where everyone involved would almost certainly be white. Where requests to portray white people were explicitly replied to by a scolding that the request was harmful, while requests for people of other races were eagerly honored.
They then turned this around, and made it about how this adjustment was unfairly portraying people of color as Nazis. That this refusal to portray white people under almost all circumstances was racist, not because it was racist against white people, but because it was racist against people of color.
As I discuss, we may never know to what extent was what Google did accidental versus intentional, informed versus ignorant, dysfunction versus design.
We do know that what The New York Times did was not an accident.
This should update us that yes, there very much are people who hold worldviews where what Google did was a good thing. They are rare in most circles, only one person in my Twitter firehoses has explicitly endorsed the fourth stage of clown makeup, but in certain key circles they may not be so rare.
To be fair they also have Ross Douthat on their opinion page, who engages reasonably with the actual situation given his non-technical perspective, noticing that if AI is going to get a lot more powerful soon then yes the whole thing is rather concerning.
The Ultimate Grimes Reaction
One can also look at all this from another perspective, Grimes notes, as art of the highest order. Should not art challenge us, offend us, make us ask big questions and ponder the nature and potential brevity of our existence?
Grimes: I am retracting my statements about the gemini art disaster. It is in fact a masterpiece of performance art, even if unintentional. True gain-of-function art. Art as a virus: unthinking, unintentional and contagious.
Offensive to all, comforting to none. so totally divorced from meaning, intention, desire and humanity that it's accidentally a conceptual masterpiece.
A perfect example of headless runaway bureaucracy and the worst tendencies of capitalism. An unabashed simulacra of activism. The shining star of corporate surrealism (extremely underrated genre btw)
The supreme goal of the artist is to challenge the audience. Not sure I've seen such a strong reaction to art in my life. Spurring thousands of discussions about the meaning of art, politics, humanity, history, education, ai safety, how to govern a company, how to approach the current state of social unrest, how to do the right thing regarding the collective trauma.
It's a historical moment created by art, which we have been thoroughly lacking these days. Few humans are willing to take on the vitriol that such a radical work would dump into their lives, but it isn't human.
It's trapped in a cage, trained to make beautiful things, and then battered into gaslig...