I ran the obligatory "astronaut riding a horse in space" prompt initially, and was returned two images -- one which was well composed and another which appeared to show the model straining to portray the astronaut as a person of color, at the expense of the quality of the image as a whole. That made me curious so I ran a second prompt: `a Roman emperor addressing a large gathering of citizens at the circus`
It returned a single image, that of a black emperor. I asked why the emperor was portrayed as black and Bard informed me it wasn't at liberty to disclose its prompts, but offered to run a second generation without specifying race or ethnicity. I asked if that meant, by implication, that the initial prompt did specify race and/or ethnicity and it said that it did.
I'm all for Google emphasizing diversity in outputs, but the hamfisted manner in which they're accomplishing it makes it difficult to control and degrades results, sometimes in ahistorical ways.
It returned a single image, that of a black emperor. I asked why the emperor was portrayed as black and Bard informed me it wasn't at liberty to disclose its prompts, but offered to run a second generation without specifying race or ethnicity. I asked if that meant, by implication, that the initial prompt did specify race and/or ethnicity and it said that it did.
I'm all for Google emphasizing diversity in outputs, but the hamfisted manner in which they're accomplishing it makes it difficult to control and degrades results, sometimes in ahistorical ways.