Black Nazis, Cherokee Founders and Indian Popes
Welcome to the new past, as seen through Gemini's woke looking glass...
“Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready-made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances. . . . It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.”
~ 1984, by George Orwell
Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World...
Black Nazis... Cherokee Founders... Indian Popes...
No doubt you’ve seen the pictures already, gentle reader, courtesy of Google’s Ministry of Misinformation, a.k.a. Gemini A.I.
The language tool got itself into the proverbial soup last week when users prompted the wokebot to generate images of certain historical figures. Here’s the meme that reportedly kicked things off...
Mixed Results
Members of the general public – perhaps incredulous that Google would be quite so brazenly arrogant in its attempts to effectively rewrite history – flooded the two-faced tool with image requests. A cheeky friend decided to join the fun, with the following (ahem...) “mixed” results:
[Ed. Note: Feel free to share these fanciful images… before they disappear down Google’s bottomless memory hole…)
Marxist Claptrap
Not content with graphically “diversifying” the past, Google’s Gemini also offers condescending remonstrations to help us mere mortals think the way we’re supposed to... that is, through the Marxist prism of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, as dictated by toxic claptrap like Critical Race Theory and Wokeness.
Thus, a “triggering” request to produce an image of the author of the Declaration of Independence was met with a stern qualifier...
“The document was drafted by Thomas Jefferson,” spat Google’s hategorythm, “who was a white man who owned slaves.”
Another, similar request earned the rather hypocritical reminder...
“It’s important to be mindful of historical accuracy when generating images, especially when it comes to sensitive topics like race and slavery. Misrepresenting history can be harmful and misleading.”
Hmm... sanctimonious lectures on “historical accuracy” from an algorithm that “thinks” Elvis was a trans Afro-mexican and which has no problem (what would one call it?) “blackfacing” history?
Uh, no thanks.
Inclusive Nazis
Of course, excluding white people from history in the name of “Inclusion” was not a problem...until including non-whites in the name of “Diversity” was.
Hence the subsequent furor around Google’s “racially inclusive Nazis...”
After images of black and Asian Nazis began circulating, Google’s Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan sprang to action:
“It’s clear that this feature missed the mark. Some of the images generated are inaccurate or even offensive,” wrote Raghavan, dripping in faux contrition, before adding that Gemini does sometimes “overcompensate” in its quest to show diversity.
That was Friday. On Monday, the stock market generated an image of its own for Google’s parent company, Alphabet... one that was bleeding red and represented a $90 billion single day loss. Ouchie!
And yet, much as we’d like to dismiss Gemini’s duplicitous blunder as just another “go woke, go broke” train wreck (and let’s be clear: Google is far, far from broke), we do well to remember that these are the people – the men, women and gender-non binary cerebral amputees – building the machines that organize and categorize the world’s information. When it comes to large language learning tools (like Gemini), the input information matters greatly...as do the people inputting that information.
These are people with their own preferences, biases and, in the case of Gemini’s Senior Director of Product Management Jack Krawczyk, uncontrolled self-loathing.
"White privilege is f---ing real," Krawczyk spewed in one tweet, dated April, 2018. "Don’t be an a---hole and act guilty about it – do your part in recognizing bias at all levels of egregious [sic]."
Then there’s this little pearler, from Nov. 2020…
“Fwiw my personal beliefs are that I don’t mind paying more taxes and investing in overcoming systemic racism and reversing climate change has not only social but economic benefits.”
Human, All Too Human
As humans – all too human – the woke engineers and virtue signalers manning the control panels at Google (and, by extension, Gemini), literally have the power to edit, augment and even erase history. These are the people controlling what you can see, what you can read and, equally important, what you cannot.
We’re often told that democracy dies in darkness... that it depends on an informed populace... and that, in the words of H.L. Mencken, “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
But what if the information gatekeepers only want you to know one side of the story; their side.
A few days ago, the excellent Substack PUBLIC, released a video of a 2017, post-election Google conference, in which jilted employees were seen clutching their blankies and crying into their kale salads.
Here’s one key exchange from the video, between an employee and Google CEO Sundar Pichai (from PUBLIC):
After a Google employee suggested that Trump won due to “misinformation” and “fake news coming from fake news websites being shared by millions of low-information voters on social media,” Pichai specifically pointed to the use of artificial intelligence to achieve the aim of countering “misinformation.”
“I think our investments in machine learning and AI is a big opportunity here,” he said. Machine learning is a form of AI.
Pichai then suggested that Google was already manipulating search results.
“There are many, many places where we are ranking,” he said, “we are algorithmically doing stuff…understanding some of the things that are happening, and course correcting.”
Is it paranoid to think that our “High-Information Overlords” might be using their gatekeeping power to skew search results in favor of their own pet projects and causes? In an A.I. generated world populated by Afro Elvises and Trans Jeffersons, is a cognitively capable Biden really such a stretch?
In Orwell’s famous novel, 1984, The Party had a chilling line. It’s worth recalling here:
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
P.S. As always, a special thanks to our dear members whose subscriber dues make this work possible.
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I think we all know that this sort of fact distortion is rampant and largely controlled by the Left.
My big concern is how to oppose them in an affective way .
Articles like yours Joel are a start and very useful but the reach is unfortunately not wide enough .
We have to get to the masses or we will lose the battle
At this juncture the best we can do is keep plugging away but we must recognize that by and large we are preaching to the already converted.
Getting “to the masses” and encouraging understanding is like chipping at a boulder with a plastic knife. Rock-hard opinions dismiss anything outside their realm. Curiosity and humility can begin to dissolve biases but that’s a long term proposition.