"We had a bug" is shooting fish in a barrel, when it comes to software.

I was genuinely concerned about their behaviour towards Timnit Gebru, though.

If you build a black box, and a bug that seems like it should have been caught in testing comes through, and there's limited documentation that the black box was programmed to do that, it makes me nervous.

Granted, stupid fun-sy public-facing image generation project.

But I'm more worried about the lack of transparency around the black box, and the internal adversarial testing that's being applied to it.

Google has an absolute right to build a model however they want -- but they should be able to proactively document how it functions, what it should and should not be used for, and any guardrails they put around it.

Is there anywhere that says "Given a prompt, Bard will attempt to deliver a racially and sexually diverse result set, and that will take precedence over historical facts"?

By all means, I support them building that model! But that's a pretty big 'if' that should be clearly documented.

> Google has an absolute right to build a model however they want

I don’t think anyone is arguing google doesn’t have the right. The argument is that google is incompetent and stupid for creating and releasing such a poor model.

I try and call out my intent explicitly, because I hate when hot-button issues get talked past.

IMHO, there are distinct technical/documentation (does it?) and ethical (should it?) issues here.

Better to keep them separate when discussing.

In general I agree with you, though I would add that Google doesn't have any kind of good reputation for documenting how their consumer facing tools work, and have been getting flak for years about perceived biases in their search results and spam filters.

It's specifically been trained to be, well, the best term is "woke" (despite the word's vagueness, LLMs mean you can actually have alignment towards very fuzzy ideas). They have started fixing things (e.g. it no longer changes between "would be an immense tragedy" and "that's a complex issue" depending on what ethnicity you talk about when asking whether it would be sad if that ethnicity went extinct), but I suspect they'll still end up a lot more biased than ChatGPT.

I think you win a prize for the first time someone has used "woke" when describing an issue to me, such that the vagueness of the term is not only acknowledged but also not a problem in its own right. Well done :)