Racism Controversy: China's offending AI image generator sparks a global uproar

Tencent's Different Dimension Me (DDM) is a newly launched AI tool designed to turn photos transform photos into anime characters. While it started for Chinese users, it gained traction in other anime-celebrating regions, such as South America. However, users quickly noticed that the AI struggled to recognize Black and plus-size individuals, who are noticeably underrepresented in traditional Japanese anime, yielding problematic and offensive outcomes.

Regrettably, the AI's creations were not always flattering. Some AI-generated images were disturbingly racially insensitive, like portraying a Black man with exaggerated lips or a white woman with disproportionately large breasts.

This troubling issue seems to stem from the AI’s limited training data. Since traditional Japanese anime rarely features Black or plus-size characters, the AI lacked sufficient reference material, leading to inaccurate and offensive results.

In response to the backlash, Tencent has issued an apology and committed to enhancing the AI's capabilities to better recognize and represent diverse individuals. For now, users are urged to be vigilant and double-check the outputs before sharing them publicly.

About Chinese neural networks

They have their own neural networks The advancements in AI and tech there are impressive, operating independently of giants like Google, Nvidia, OpenAI, or Midjourney.

• Baidu, a heavyweight in search engines and autonomous driving, is employing ERNIE-ViLG, a model comprising 10 billion parameters, fine-tuned using a dataset of 145 million Chinese image and text pairs.

• Different Dimension Me ( DDM The Different Dimension Me tool developed by Tencent is remarkable in its ability to convert photographs into anime figures. It’s primarily designed for Chinese users but quickly found its place among anime fans worldwide.

• Another Chinese text-to-image model Taiyi is an innovative project from IDEA, a research lab under the guidance of Harry Shum, who co-founded the renowned Microsoft Research Asia. This open-source model is based on 20 million carefully curated Chinese image-text pairs and boasts one billion parameters.

It’s fascinating to observe how China will manage this controversy, given their extensive history with censorship. While AI enthusiasts elsewhere clamor for unrestricted technology like 'Stable Diffusion without Censorship', the Chinese authorities seem more focused on refining algorithms to regulate neural networks without considering the sentiments of the stakeholders. regulation The anxiety surrounding AI potentially replacing anime creators is quite palpable. interests of the state Watermarks introduced by ChatGPT might enable Google to differentiate between human-written and AI-generated content.

Read more about AI:

• 10 Prominent AI Innovations That Could Transform the Sports Industry
• Please keep in mind that the information presented here should not be construed as legal, tax, investment, financial advice, or any other form of guidance. It is crucial to invest only what you can afford to lose and seek independent financial counsel if you have any uncertainties. For further details, we recommend checking the terms and conditions as well as the help and support resources provided by the issuer or advertiser. MetaversePost is dedicated to delivering accurate and impartial information, although market circumstances can change unexpectedly.
• Damir serves as the team lead, product manager, and editor at Metaverse Post, where he delves into subjects such as AI/ML, AGI, LLMs, Metaverse, and Web3-related fields. His engaging articles resonate with a vast audience of over a million readers each month. With a solid background of ten years in SEO and digital marketing, Damir's insights have been featured in outlets like Mashable, Wired, Cointelegraph, The New Yorker, Inside.com, Entrepreneur, BeInCrypto, and more. As a digital nomad, he traverses between the UAE, Turkey, Russia, and the CIS. His academic foundation in physics has armed him with critical thinking skills essential for navigating the rapidly-evolving digital landscape.