It's because they want to have 0 responsibility for what is posted on their platform. Any past action on their part to counter the spread of misinformation establishes precidant they do not want.
Also, outrageous, conspiracy-oriented, and rage-bait content has much higher engagement anyway, which is why their algorithm has historically encouraged it so heavily. Explicit misinformation falls into those categories and has been good for their bottom line and getting everyone's parents addicted to the platform
You say "the co founders" like it was ever anything more than a hashtag. There are literally thousands of organizations using the name started by entirely random people, many of which are legitimate charities and many of which are grifts
Seems like all they need to do is, when prompted to generate images of people, ask for clarification on whether the user wants to constrain the appearance, use the default output of the model, or otherwise offer to modify the prompt to reduce biases or however they would describe it. Doesn't even have to be interactive, just a note on the side would be enough.
Ultimately the only "real" concern was silently perpetuating biases, as long as it isn't silent and the user is made aware of the options, who cares? You'll never be able to baby-proof these things enough to stop "bad actors" from generating whatever they want without compromising the actual usage
Society wants the benefits without paying the true costs for parents to raise kids and not have the experience suck. Even in countries with robust pro natalist policies, people want less or no kids.
I had always assumed they were doing it completely mathematically though. Like collating spectrometry readings to know what elements were present where and figuring out the temperature for blackbody emission or something, or even just linearly transforming the raw data from the spectrum the telescope can receive to the visible spectrum.
Kinda disappointing if it's really just a paint by numbers Photoshop to look nice
Terrestrial cameras don't behave that way. They apply tone curves from the beginning. They have to pick a white balance. They have to cram an HDR signal into an 8-bit image. They have to decide exactly how to process the color- every film stock and digital camera renders color a bit differently, even when ones that are all trying to produce true-color images and there are humans around who can compare it with their own subjective perceptions. The simplest, linearest way to do it is probably wrong, due to mismatches between human color perception and the camera's sensor / film stock. Eg, human rods and cones almost certainly don't have the same frequency response as the color filters inside your camera, and that's just the beginning.
Anyway, this post shows an example comparing a "flat" color composite and one that's been tonemapped etc. This is using Hubble data but it's the same subject as one of the JWST images.
I think the average programmer would be horrified if they really knew the state of modern chip design. SWEs already know how bad most software is, but imagine an entire industry of tens of thousands of people writing code (HDL/TCL), who often don't even think what they do is programming, that has evolved over the last 50 years with minimal interaction with the rest of the software engineering world.
Verilog is a nightmare. The tools are buggy. Everyone has Stockholm syndrome. Version control is considered state-of-the-art and you're lucky if your org uses it.
I've seen a lot of HDL code in my career, and there's a huge number of well respected senior engineers who think having any form of hierarchy, abstraction, or even for-loops is very advanced design practice.
The only good part is the bar is so low it's easy to standout and climb. I think the industry is in a position where it would be surprisingly easy for a startup of seasoned SWEs with a decent understanding of how to write optimized hardware to churn out competitive chips with 10x the velocity of the big players like Nvidia/AMD/Intel
Also, outrageous, conspiracy-oriented, and rage-bait content has much higher engagement anyway, which is why their algorithm has historically encouraged it so heavily. Explicit misinformation falls into those categories and has been good for their bottom line and getting everyone's parents addicted to the platform