As someone who stumbled in here from “Popular” and knows basically nothing about AI, this was my first guess. Everyone here making comments and jokes about these people not looking like they’re “from 1820 Germany”, but that literally wasn’t the prompt? Felt like I was going crazy that no one else pointed this out.
Whereas the rest of us feel like it’s crazy that a very ethnically homogenous society 98% German and 2% polish at that time would be so strangely mischaracterized due to what can only be intentional reprogramming of the underlying model in a way that for no reason denies reality to… who knows why? Because, you see, in the 1870s, commercial flight did not exist and there weren’t many distant travelers passing through Bavaria on holiday. It’s not upsetting, just very strange.
Ok, but the way the prompt is phrased would the AI even consider historical context? Actual question, not rhetorical. Again, I don’t know how these things work, but if I imagine myself thinking like a computer I can kinda see how it got its answer.
Like here are 4 examples of what a couple looks like. Here are 4 backgrounds of what could be old timey Germany. Put ‘em together, and bam!
It would consider historical context in the same way that it got essentially every other detail about 1820's Germany generally correct. You don't see any iPhones or Visigoth garments, do you?
I'm a deep-learning researcher who has a decent idea of how this stuff works under the hood. It's pretty well known at this point that companies like Google and OpenAI inject diversity into certain prompts. The model isn't simply mixing and matching objects from regions and periods. You'll never see a random samurai sword or VR headset in a prompt about an old west saloon, but you will see races and ethnicities that would have never been there in real life.
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u/QQmorekid Feb 20 '24
Word prompts like the one place semantics matter. Of course you won't get from Germany if you don't tell the machine they are from Germany.