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People take part in the annual Gay Pride parade in support of LGBT community, in Santiago, Chile, June 22, 2019.
AI struggles with gender and race
Generative AI keeps messing up on important issues about diversity and representation — especially when it comes to love and sex.
According to one report from The Verge, Meta’s AI image generator repeatedly refused to generate images of an Asian man with a white woman as a couple. When it finally produced one of an Asian woman and a white man, the man was significantly older than the woman.
Meanwhile, Wired found that different AI image geneators routinely represent LGBTQ individuals as having purple hair. And when you don’t specify what ethnicity they should be, these systems tend to default to showing white people.
Generative AI tools are no better than their underlying training data. If their training data is biased, say, by having disproportionate amounts of queer people with highlighter-colored hair, it will consistently represent them as such. It’s incumbent on the proprietors of these models to both improve their training data — buying or accumulating more comprehensive datasets — but, more importantly, tweaking the outputs so they are more inclusive and less stereotypical. That requires lots of testing, and consultation with real-world people from diverse backgrounds about the harms of such representation failures.
But they need to be wary of overcorrection too: Google was recently condemned for generating Black and Asian Nazi soldiers as well as Native Americans in Viking garb. AI can’t understand the complexities of these things yet — but the humans in charge need to.Demonstrators carry flower crowns during a symbolic funeral for their wages in Buenos Aires.
Hard Numbers: RIP wages in Argentina, Japan's missile arsenal, Mogadishu attack, Singapore’s big LGBT move
317: Argentine workers held Friday a mock funeral procession for the "death" of the living wage in the country, where sky-high inflation is wiping out purchasing power. The minimum wage of $317 a month now covers less than half the cost of a basic food basket for a family of four.
1,000: Japan is stockpiling more than 1,000 long-range missiles, and for the first time plans to deploy the arsenal on islands facing China and North Korea. Two weeks ago, China responded to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan by firing ballistic missiles around the island, five of which landed inside Japan's exclusive economic zone.
21: At least 20 people were killed Sunday in Mogadishu after security forces ended a standoff with al-Shabab militants who had stormed a hotel and taken hostages. It's the first attack in Somalia's capital by the group linked to al-Qaida since President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud took over in May.
377: In a surprise move Sunday, PM Lee Hsien Loong announced that Singapore will repeal section 377A of the criminal code, a colonial-era law banning same-sex relationships. The notoriously conservative island nation is the latest Asian government to decriminalize gay sex after India, Thailand, and Taiwan (where same-sex marriages are allowed since 2019).