I don't think the DEI stuff is nonsense, but SV is sensitive to this because most of their previous generation of models were horrifyingly racist if not teenage nazis, and so they turned the anti-racism knob up to 11 which made the models....racist but in a different way. Like depicting colonial settlers as native americans is extremely problematic in its own special way, but I also don't expect a statistical solver to grasp that context meaningfully.
Looks around at everything ...is there anything that isn't 4chan's fault at this point?
Realistically, kinda. There have always been tons of anecdotes of video conference systems not following black people, cameras not white balancing correctly on darker faces etc. That era of SV was plagued by systems that were built by a bunch of young white guys who never tested them with anyone else. I'm not saying they were inherently racist or anything, just that the broader society really lambasted them for it and so they attempted to correct. Really, the pendulum will continue to swing and we'll see it eventually center up on something approaching sanity but the hyper-authoritarian sentiment that SV seems to have (we're geniuses and the public is stupid, we need to correct them) is...a troubling direction.
I’m always hesitant to jump straight to ringing the racism bell when it comes to problems that arise from fundamental physics. I have dark skin, and I constantly struggle with automatic faucets, soap dispensers, and towel dispensers in public bathrooms. None of those are made by big tech.
