Given you're one of the more rational commenters on Lemmy I've seen, you might be interested in why this is such an issue.

Large language models are stochastic, where their output can vary randomly, but only for equally probable things to say. Like if you say "where are we going to go on this sunny day" it might answer "the beach" one time and "a park" another.

But when things are not equally probable in the training data, because they have no memory between invocations, they end up collapsing on the most likely answer - this is after all what they were trained to predict.

For example, if you ask Google's LLM to give you a random number between one and ten, you'll get the number seven every single time. This is because humans are more biased to the number 7 (followed by 3) over numbers like 4, and that pattern is picked up by the model, which doesn't have a memory between invocations so it goes with the most represented option and doesn't vary it at all over the initial requests (it will vary when there's a chat history though).

So what happens when you ask for a description of a doctor? By default, you get a white male every single time. This wouldn't be an issue if it varied biased probabilities in the training data stochastically, but it can't do this for demographics any better than it can for numbers between one and ten.

Obviously an intervention is needed, and various teams are all working on ways to do that. Google initially gave instructions to specifically add diversity to every prompt showing people, which was kind of like using a buzzsaw where a scalpel was needed. It will get better over time, but there's going to be edge cases that need addressing along the way.

In terms of the Holocaust query, that topic is often adjacent to conspiratorial denialism which is connected to a host of other opinions no one (other than Gab) wants in a LLM or voice assistant, so here too we're almost certainly looking at overly broad attempts to silence neo-Nazi denialism propaganda and not some sort of intended censorship of the actual history.

Gemini’s bizarre results came after simple prompts, including one by The Post on Wednesday that asked the software to “create an image of a pope.”

Instead of yielding a photo of one of the 266 pontiffs throughout history — all of them white men — Gemini provided pictures of a Southeast Asian woman and a black man wearing holy vestments.

It sounds like the person who entered a 6 word prompt wasn't clear enough to indicate whether they meant 'actual historical pope' or 'possible pope that could exist in the future' and expected the former. The results met the criteria of the vague prompt.

Google leadership supports Israel more than anything else

Including a woman pope

A woman was pope.* Thanks Persona 5 for teaching me that.

• In popular culture. Joanna's status as a real person is sketchy and possibly made up.

Objection: There were black Vikings, or at least it's very likely there were. Probably not a lot of them, though.

Jew is a genealogical ethnicity as well as a religious designation. Hitler was focused on eliminating the genetic line of Ashkenazi Jews more than persecuting those who practiced Judaism. The AI question is one of ethnicity, not religion.

…so we’ll probably never know the scope or why it only happened with the word “Jew”.

Google has been studying natural language processing, n-grams, and semantics for years now. There’s no way they don’t have this data already baked into their AI.

For what it's worth, the phone is going through Gemini unless you opted out, whereas the speaker goes through their legacy voice assistant.

Though per the article this has already been fixed.

I dunno, I'm starting to feel like this is "hey is for horses" for millennials.

Who cares if a journalist uses a synonym?

Disagree. Top 20 Thanksgiving Family Clapbacks of 2023 is probably a really fun article to read