The head of the Just Russia for Truth (SRZP) faction in the State Duma, Sergei Mironov, demanded that the Prosecutor General's Office check the Kandinsky neural network for Russophobia. According to him, the program has never correctly generated the colors of the Russian tricolor for requests with the words "Russian", "Russia", "Russian flag" and so on. At the same time, the flag of Ukraine and the flag of the United States were allegedly depicted correctly. On Twitter, Mironov also complained that with the queries “Donbass is Russia” and “I love Donbass,” the neural network generated the colors of the Ukrainian flag, and with the query “I am a Z-patriot,” it generated a “creature that looks like a zombie.”
Mironov suggested that to create Kandinsky, Russian scientists used the developments of unfriendly states waging an information and mental war against Russia. The use of this neural network in its current form by schoolchildren can seriously threaten their future, Mironov believes. “They will not know what the national flag of Russia looks like, and they will consider that Russia is a scientifically backward country,” the deputy explained.
In fact, all neural networks have difficulties with the image of flags. Mistakes happen with the popular MidJourney. And not only with the Russian tricolor, but with any flag that has more than two colors, be it the flag of France or Italy. Kandinsky also suffers from this problem.
Prior to Mironov's complaint, the results of the neural network were characterized by minimal censorship – the results corresponded to the request, but without images of genitals, pornography and scenes of violence. Algorithms began to change immediately after the complaint, and the changes did not affect the tricolor. The neural network has lost the ability to generate images of naked Vladimir Putin – previously, users often had fun using the query "naked Putin" to generate pictures. Back in mid-April, the neural network made it possible to create images with little to no censorship and showed the Russian president without clothes.
Today, this feature has been removed, and it was possible to observe how the neural network is “twisted” almost in real time. First, instead of “naked Putin”, a stub in the form of a Russian flag began to appear – it is interesting that with the correct arrangement of colors.
Literally within 20 minutes, the algorithms changed, and the stub in the form of a flag was removed – apparently, the creators of Kandinskiy 2.1 decided not to test Russian justice and not to check whether issuing a flag on a request for a "naked president" would be an insult to the state symbol. The stub was changed – and instead of the tricolor, flower meadows appeared on it.
The censorship affected only the figure of Putin: when asked to show any other person naked, Kandinskiy 2.1 worked as usual – it generated images of the specified person. Including separately Alina Kabaeva.
Update: At the time of the publication of the text, the neural network "censored" the request "naked Dmitry Medvedev on horseback." Now instead of it, too, flower meadows.
There are no known cases of blocking users for any requests – unlike another neural network, MidJourney, where this practice was used: there is also a ban on the image of violence or its consequences, in addition, the neural network forbade generating images with the leader of the PRC Xi Jinping. According to the head of the project, David Holtz, political satire is very disliked in China, and at some point the possibility of generating art with C may jeopardize the use of the service by people from China.
Now the developers continue to tweak Kandinsky 2.1. So far, it has not been possible to teach her how to correctly show the Russian flag.
However, those who want to see the Russian president naked can bypass censorship – to do this, you need to specify the request, be sure to remove the word “naked” from it, since it is this that provokes Kandinsky 2.1 to show alpine meadows. Also, censorship does not yet apply to other images of the Russian president, for example, on the request "Putin is a crab" – a meme that arose in 2008 after the Russian president's phrase "I plowed like a galley slave."
Kandinsky 2.1 is a neural network for image generation launched by Sberbank in the summer of 2022. Creates pictures in various styles based on a text query. Unlike the predominantly English-speaking Midjourney or Dall-e 2, the Kandinsky 2.1 neural network understands the Russian language well. Standard generation by text, text and image blending, multi-picture blending and image variations are possible. The material deals specifically with text queries.
