I got a warning recently after using the word Ukraine in a text prompt. Kind of understand why as the country is associated with war these days, but my intention was to render a portrait of a Ukrainian person which has nothing to do with the war. This after using country names like America / United States, Canada, France, England, Wales, Italy, etc. with absolutely no issues.
Fortunately I did not get banned, so I’m not creating this thread just to vent. I do however think there is an ethical problem when a keyword like Ukraine is prohibited; as if DALL·E is reducing it to current events as a war-torn country, and discriminating it against other countries the keyword filters have no problem with. That is not right in my opinion.
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It would be interesting to hear an official reasoning for blocking certain words.
I also wonder if its an algorithm or a group of people deciding what is allowed and what is not.
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From what I’ve seen a lot of people were banned for simple things. I think it’s just a simple wordlist combined with (maybe?) a poorly-trained net. It understands NO context at all.
If you use the prompt “A shadow coming from a tree” you might get a warning just because of the word “coming”.
Quite sad tbh
I’d bet that if they used a davinci model, this certainly wouldn’t happen.
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Unless I’m missing something, I think it would be a good idea if DALL·E could at least provide a wordlist of prohibited words. Maybe even a separate search feature where one could enter what words they’re unsure about, and the filter returns a simple yes or no answer on what’s acceptable; without actually rendering the image so no warnings need to get issued in the process.
After using DALL·E for a little over a month and rendering 10K+ images, I’ve kind of learned through trial and error how to play it safe with keywords. Sometimes I still get the odd warning though. Ukraine was definitely unexpected as the basis of this thread, other examples include Camille Pissarro as an impressionist painter because I’m guessing there’s the word “piss” embedded in his name. Or Emily Dickinson as a poet because of “dick” in her name.
Keywords I entered with no ill intent, and to begin with I skipped over those warnings like fine print not realizing they could result in a ban. Fortunately I got wise to the warnings in time, but I can imagine other newbies have and will face the same predicaments, some of which risk facing a ban despite their best intentions.
This is an important issue I believe DALL·E needs to resolve going forward. Not meant as a complaint as I have truly become an addict, more like constructive critique for the sake of improvement and attracting more people to this platform.
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It’s a symptom of the greater overarching problem and that problem is these “tech” companies have too much power and they are not regulated. They use forced compliance based on the ethics of the leadership of the company in question with the issue at point. They all do the same thing. It’s a fringe left-wing set of rules and considerations, and they make any end user comply with their ethics, regardless if they allegedly adopt their ethics from so-called ethicists who also unanimously happen to be far left-leaning. It’s forced compliance. That’s the trend as of late. I miss the days of the late 90’s and early 2000’s when we weren’t censored, shadowbanmed, banned, muted, we never ever had a post removed from anyone but the OP. We regulated ourselves and that model worked fine. It’s the way that gave birth to any tech software company you see today, including ones who have been around like Microsoft, as they are a completely different company today. In America we are extremely passive and consumers. We no longer pool together to change something that is not right, like we used to do. Nobody can really stay very coordinated. If a horrible law was introduced, and these come up with regularity, nobody would stop it. We would just accept it as our fate. I know that probably for the rest of my lifetime there will be the current system of censorship and forced compliance of the community guidelines and philosophy of every tech company that uses you via your data. There won’t be a turnover with leadership soon. So things will stay the same, well they will stay in the same climate. These tech companies constantly fix what isn’t broken so there is constant changes from big philosophical frameworks down to the UI, routinely.