Canva apologizes after its AI tool replaces 'Palestine' in designs

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/919028/canva-magic-layers-ai-replacing-palestine

by alex_suzuki • 3 months ago

79 31 3 months ago

MarkusQ2• 3 months ago

We have to stop acting like these things "think"; it leads to really weird misinterpretations of the output as "meaning" things.

For example, they will occasionally replace "colour" with "color". Why? Because both occur in the training data in the "same role" but "color" is, apparently, more common[1]. You can also trick them into replacing things like "sardines" with "anchovies" (on pizza) and "head of lettuce" with "cabbage" in the context of rowboats.

They are lossy text compressing parrots and we are all suffering from a massive madness-of-crowds scale Eliza Effect.

[1] Yep. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=color%2C+colou...

Alive-in-20252• 3 months ago

This feels very different because there is no powerful political force trying to squelch discussion of colour or sardine. But there are lots of powerful folks trying to avoid discussions about Gaza or Palestine and related things. It's to their advantage to have tools hide that word

MarkusQ2• 3 months ago

There are also an awful lot of people trying to push it/publicize it.

rglover• 3 months ago

It feels different because it's a political matter, but this is just probability doing what it does. Considering "Ukraine" is likely far more common in the training data, this isn't a terribly surprising outcome.

wonnage2• 3 months ago

There are trillions of dollars riding on the fact that they in fact think, and a bunch of people here have their lottery tickets tied up in that, so good luck with that

semiquaver2• 3 months ago

Don’t worry, goalpost shifting will ensure that no matter how useful LLMs get, there will always be a large contingent of people who insist that anything non-human is not thinking, just sparkling cognition.

stetrain• 3 months ago

When a company packages this tool up and makes it part of their product they are taking some of that responsibility. The end user isn't supposed to need to know what an LLM is or how it works, that's what they're paying Canva for.

Kapura2• 3 months ago

All of these tools that are not controlled by the user, trained on datasets they do not own or understand, will inevitably be subject to manipulation. I do not necessarily believe that Canva went in and specifically trained their AI models to do this, but that's almost worse because they become the face of what somebody else has decided their model should be doing.

Anybody using AI tools should be extremely cautious about what is being produced.

tracker13• 3 months ago

You can see it a lot if you ask anything remotely political to the different AI models... in some places you can definitely see the hand-editing/overrides as well.

Hard to get around these kinds of issues and definitely leads me to avoid them for non-technical questions.

_doctor_love3• 3 months ago

Do you have examples of this? I feel I'm able to get decent answers around politics from all the main chatbot providers, the key is in the prompting and then applying critical thinking while reading the response.

That said, there is no such thing as an objective unbiased political opinion. Chinese LLMs may have issues with events of 1989 but Western LLMs have their blindspots too.

dsign• 3 months ago

It's not just politics. A while ago, as an experiment, I wrapped some teleological[^1] questions in a small story of a demon offering a slightly ambiguous bargain to a person. Then I had a lot of fun having the frontier models evaluate if the demon was "good" or "bad". ChatGPT ranked as a rancid right-wing conservative ready to burn somebody at the stake, while Opus reasoning was chill. Interestingly, both models could clearly "understand" the deal, i.e. reason about its final consequences for the trapped soul, but ChatGPT moralized lots and made about as much sense as a stubborn priest.

[^1]: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/teleology

tomwheeler• 3 months ago

All of these tools ... will inevitably be subject to manipulation.

I have often wondered about the legality of such manipulation. As AI becomes used for increasingly important things, it becomes increasingly valuable to make a system serve the needs of someone other than its owner.

AIorNot• 3 months ago

Yes these models apply their knowledge non-deterministically. We need to be aware and ready to handle their 'behaviours' doesn't mean they are not useful - I feel like ant-AI advocates are rushing to find issues

It reminds me of the early internet days and everyone making a big deal about the anonymity of internet forurms and safety.. sure it is an isssue

Kapura2• 3 months ago

Do you not think it's an issue when the name of a country is replaced with a fully different country name as a result of the AI output? The problem is manifest. It's right there. You can see it, can't you?

lostlogin• 3 months ago

The most recent episode of John Oliver has a user getting instructions on making a bomb, and AI advising teenagers not to talk to their parents about suicidal thoughts.

I know you aren’t denying issues exist, but companies aren’t handling the issues (their PR around it is disturbing) and regulation is too far behind.

wky• 3 months ago

There’s a relatively obvious constraint to check here: compositing the layers back together should produce a (near) identical image. Would it not be preferable to throw an error if the model fails to faithfully segment the image?

EtienneDeLyon• 3 months ago

This is not by accident!

There are a lot of smart and talented people working hard to embed Hasbara into LLMs.

ebbi• 3 months ago

not sure why you're getting downvoted. Jonathan Greenblatt - of the ADL - has explicitly said that they're doing this.

Caius-Cosades• 3 months ago

The datasets go through customer specified political guidelines/screening, and so if the model is then penalized for certain political flags/symbols/opinions then this is what you'll be getting. That's just how the sausage is being made.

Canva apologizes after its AI tool replaces 'Palestine' in designs

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