AI Stumbles at Women’s Ghat
If you are a
reader who dreads the imminent arrival of doomsday of AI-driven robots
enslaving or exterminating humans; this blog may cheer you up. Do not lose your
sleep, for that fateful day is unlikely to arrive in the foreseeable future.
What’s my
credential to predict the future, you may ask? A valid query.
Keen User of AI
When I
joined a meeting last week a senior colleague announced, ‘Mr. Dash is a keen
user of AI.’ Since the colleague is very kind, I like to believe that his
comment was complimentary, and not an innuendo for this blogger’s lack of natural
intelligence.
I have kind
of dipped my toes in popular AI apps, have written a few blogs on my experience
and had shared my little learning with members of IIPA, Bhopal Branch,
and the Saturday Club. That is my sole claim to fame as an AI expert!
Ja Jaa Re Bhasi Bhasi Ja
In the
previous blog (Neelamadhava, Mahanadi & Mussoorie) I had used two images
from Wiki Commons Media. After
publishing the blog, I remembered a recent news report about a homegrown AI
Image Generator.
New Kid on the Block
You have
heard of ChatGPT, Bing AI (now Copilot), Google Bard, Dall-e, etc.; but may not
be aware of the new kid on the block. Kalaido.ai is an AI image generator
released by Fractal, our homegrown unicorn. The company offers an impressive range
of AI-based services, and among its partners are global giants – Amazon,
Google, and Microsoft. For further details about this impressive company, a
link is provided at end notes.[i]
I signed up for
kalaido.ai and tasked it to generate an image for the scene depicted in the opening
stanza of Ja Jaa Re Bhasi Bhasi Ja, for which I gave the following
textual prompt:
“Sunrise at
river Mahanadi at Sambalpur, Odisha. A beautiful unmarried girl looking sad is bathing
on the stairs on the east bank. She is
wearing a Sambalpuri handloom saree with red borders. A manual boat floats by
on the blue waves. Four muscular, dark-brown, bare-chested boatmen are rowing
the boat.”
A disclaimer
is due. The song doesn’t mention all these details, but I exercised poetic
licence to get an attractive image!
It threw up
an Error Message:
“The
requested image description may violate our content generation policy.”
I scratched
my head. What was offensive or prurient in my prompt? Upon careful reading, I
got why kalaido was unwilling. I had asked for an image of a beautiful
unmarried girl bathing on the stairs of the river. Kalaido deduced that
I was looking for a semi-nude pornographic image and refused to oblige. Once I
removed the reference to bathing, kalaido had no issue.
Women’s Bathing Ghats
In an era
before the supply of running water to homes and the advent of AI; at rivers, rivulets,
and ponds bathing ghats were ubiquitous and Women’s ghats were as exclusive as HER
toilets at airports. In western Odisha, these were named maejhi ghat to
differentiate from anrra or andira ghat for the males. Boys of 8 years
or below tagged along with their mothers to the women’s ghat, but as soon as a
boy began to ‘look’, he was blackballed and forthwith expelled by the alert and
stern elderly ladies, the guardian angels of those ghats. In these public
baths, the women changed clothes with such decorum and deftness that distant prurient
eyes, if any, would be sorely disappointed, and the scene, if part of an
imaginary film, would win the approval of the strictest Censor Board members.
I will not
fault AI for stumbling at Mahanadi’s maejhi ghat at Sambalpur, or for being
clueless about the socio-cultural context of women’s bathing ghats in India of a
previous era.
Test Run
I gave the same task and the same text input to the most popular Apps including Gemini by Google which said:
"We are working to improve Gemini’s ability to generate images of people. We expect this feature to return soon and will notify you in release updates when it does."
Here is the result of the
Test Run. Each AI Image Generator produced three or four images of which I
present below the one that was closest to my text input.
Kalaido
.png)
Dall-e2
Copilot
What do you think? It is easy to find many defects in each of these images, but the baby-steps of these recent Apps are no less impressive and adorable.
Which one is
the best? It is for you to decide. Let a thousand images bloom, and pick up the
one you like best. Human Intelligence makes the choice. You are the master of
AI, at least at present.
Postscript
[i] https://fractal.ai/ai-for-good/
No comments:
Post a Comment