"Reality" as defined by the available training set isn't necessarily reality.

For example, Google's image search results pre-tweaking had some interesting thoughts on what constitutes a professional hairstyle, and that searches for "men" and "women" should only return light-skinned people: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/08/does-goog...

Does that reflect reality? No.

(I suspect there are also mostly unstated but very real concerns about these being used as child pornography, revenge porn, "show my ex brutally murdered" etc. generators.)

I know you're anon trolling, but the authors' names are:

Chitwan Saharia, William Chan, Saurabh Saxena†, Lala Li†, Jay Whang†, Emily Denton, Seyed Kamyar Seyed Ghasemipour, Burcu Karagol Ayan, S. Sara Mahdavi, Rapha Gontijo Lopes, Tim Salimans, Jonathan Ho†, David Fleet†, Mohammad Norouzi

Translation: AI has the potential to transform society. When we release this model to the public it will be used in ways we haven’t anticipated. We know the model has bias and we need more time to consider releasing this to the public out of concerns that this transformative technology further perpetuate mistakes that we’ve made in our recent past.

"As we wish it to be" is not totally true, because there are some places where humanity's iconographic reality (which Imagen trains on) differs significantly from actual reality.

One example would be if Imagen draws a group of mostly white people when you say "draw a group of people". This doesn't reflect actual reality. Another would be if Imagen draws a group of men when you say "draw a group of doctors".

In these cases where iconographic reality differs from actual reality, hand-tuning could be used to bring it closer to the real world, not just the world as we might wish it to be!

I agree there's a problem here. But I'd state it more as "new technologies are being held to a vastly higher standard than existing ones." Imagine TV studios issuing a moratorium on any new shows that made being white (or rich) seem more normal than it was! The public might rightly expect studios to turn the dials away from the blatant biases of the past, but even if this would be beneficial the progressive and activist public is generations away from expecting a TV studio to not release shows until they're confirmed to be bias-free.

That said, Google's decision to not publish is probably less about the inequities in AI's representation of reality and more about the AI sometimes spitting out drawings that are offensive in the US, like racist caricatures.

Except "reality" in this case is just their biased training set. E.g. There's more non-white doctors and nurses in the world than white ones, yet their model would likely show an image of white person when you type in "doctor".

    Translation: we need to hand-tune this to not reflect reality

Is it reflecting reality, though?

Seems to me that (as with any ML stuff, right?) it's reflecting the training corpus.

Futhermore, is it this thing's job to reflect reality?

    the world as we (Caucasian/Asian male American woke 
    upper-middle class San Fransisco engineers) wish it to be

Snarky answer: Ah, yes, let's make sure that things like "A giant cobra snake on a farm. The snake is made out of corn" reflect reality.

Heartfelt answer: Yes, there is some of that wishful thinking or editorializing. I don't consider it to be erasing or denying reality. This is a tool that synthesizes unreality. I don't think that such a tool should, say, refuse to synthesize an image of a female POTUS because one hasn't existed yet. This is art, not a reporting tool... and keep in mind that art not only imitates life but also influences it.

Indeed. As the saying goes, we are truly living in a post-truth world.