This technique is applied at the system level when DALL·E is given a prompt describing a person that does not specify race or gender, like “firefighter.”
This would seem to imply that the AI is still based, but they tweak the prompt to force it to output cringe results (eg. they force it to return "black lesbian firefighter" for some percentage of the results)
From what I've heard, that seems to be the case. They're not actually changing the algorithm, at least not yet, they're just silently inserting race and gender into the prompt. When they started messing around with it, if you just prompted something like "person holding a sign," the signs kept generating with terms like "woman" and "black" on them.
This would seem to imply that the AI is still based, but they tweak the prompt to force it to output cringe results (eg. they force it to return "black lesbian firefighter" for some percentage of the results)
From what I've heard, that seems to be the case. They're not actually changing the algorithm, at least not yet, they're just silently inserting race and gender into the prompt. When they started messing around with it, if you just prompted something like "person holding a sign," the signs kept generating with terms like "woman" and "black" on them.