"Stepping back, I don’t, as a rule, want to wade into politics, and definitely not into culture war issues. At some point, though, you just have to state plainly that this is ridiculous. Google specifically, and tech companies broadly, have long been sensitive to accusations of bias; that has extended to image generation, and I can understand the sentiment in terms of depicting theoretical scenarios. At the same time, many of these images are about actual history; I’m reminded of George Orwell in 1984:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories.

Even if you don’t want to go so far as to invoke the political implications of Orwell’s book, the most generous interpretation of Google’s over-aggressive RLHF of their models is that they are scared of being criticized. That, though, is just as bad: Google is blatantly sacrificing its mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” by creating entirely new realities because it’s scared of some bad press. Moreover, there are implications for business: Google has the models and the infrastructure, but winning in AI given their business model challenges will require boldness; this shameful willingness to change the world’s information in an attempt to avoid criticism reeks — in the best case scenario! — of abject timidity."