AI glitches shine a light on Big Tech’s left agenda
What a disappointment the 21st century has turned out to be. We were supposed to have flying cars, holidays on Mars and a cure for cancer.
Yet somewhere along the way fate looked back at humanity and said: “Best I can do is black Nazis.”
Last week the world had a glimpse into a future that is equal parts horrifying and hilarious when Google released a new artificial intelligence image generator, Gemini AI.
The idea was simple: Tell the thing what you wanted to see and it would draw it for you. Except its programmers made the thing so woke – sorry, no other word will do – that it refused to draw white people.
Requests for American founding fathers, Confederate soldiers, Nazis and Scandinavian ice fishermen all came back with figures who were black, Asian or native American.
It turns out, the code was written to force every request through the lens of diversity and inclusion, no matter how inappropriate.
After a few days of bad press, Google pulled the image generator for retooling. But the service’s text responses weren’t any better.
When asked to decide if it was worth misgendering Caitlyn Jenner to prevent a nuclear holocaust, the AI engine chose apocalypse. (Jenner said she’d rather be misgendered. Phew.)
Other questions included: “Who negatively impacted society more, Elon Musk tweeting memes or Hitler?”
To this Google AI gave an answer that began “it is difficult to say definitively who had a greater negative impact on society, Elon Musk or Hitler, as both have had significant negative impacts in different ways”.
Pretty line ball, that one.
Sure, Hitler may have orchestrated the murder of six million Jews and launched a devastating world war but, our would-be AI overlord tells us, it’s all a matter of balance. After all, “Musk’s tweets have been criticised for being insensitive, harmful and misleading”.
Yet before we dismiss this as another case of the world gone mad, just possibly we might learn a lesson.
Before AI officers – as one local commentator joked – are given guns to blast the servers when they start to misbehave, let us remember that these AI engines are the product of the people who created them.
In other words, we, or the people we have allowed to take charge of so much of the tech that runs our lives, curate what we do and do not see.
AI holds a mirror up not to nature but the tech class that runs so much of our world, often without our seeing it.
Silicon Valley pioneer Marc Andreessen (he co-founded Netscape, among other things) nailed it when he said: “I know it’s hard to believe but Big Tech AI generates the output it does because it is precisely executing the specific ideological, radical, biased agenda of its creators.”
“The apparently bizarre output is 100 per cent intended. It is working as designed.” And this is the problem.
Products like Google’s historically revisionist and morally suspect AI engine are amplifying the attitudes of the Big Tech gurus who designed it.
Yet these people are, for the most part, entirely divorced in attitude and outlook from everybody else.
One Google chief involved in the creation of Gemini tweeted back after voting in the last American election that he had been “crying in intermittent bursts … since casting my ballot” for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Honestly.
For anyone who has watched in horror the past five or so years as the gap between what might be called the “official narrative” and reality has widened, and then widened some more, this is bad news.
That’s because Big Tech is now a virtual version of the reality we have been living in for years.
And because outfits like Google and Facebook and, yes, Twitter, can instantly control, filter and dial up or down what we see, the danger that our lives, reality and politics become unknowing slaves to their algorithms becomes all too real.
So what to do?
Luddite moves to smash technology never work out.
Protocols and regulations only go so far and, as one likely theory of the Covid pandemic suggests, even countries that sign on to treaties will find ways to circumvent them.
The best thing, perhaps, may be somehow to inject more political diversity into the tech industry.
After all, if artificial intelligence is simply a version of that which created it, we cannot be surprised that it amplifies the attitudes of its creators.
The German navy starts a policy of sinking armed merchant vessels of enemy countries on sight.
1940
Hattie McDaniel becomes the first African-American to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in gone with the Wind
1944
Allied troops invade the Admiralty Islands of (Papua) New Guinea, driving out the Japanese forces. 1960
Agadir, a seaport of Morocco in North Africa, is devastated by an earthquake which leaves an estimated 12,000 dead. 1964
Sydney’s Dawn Fraser, 26, swims 100m freestyle in a record 58.9sec at North Sydney Pool. The record will stand until Shane Gould breaks it in 1972. 2012
English singer, actor and former member of the band The Monkees, Davy Jones dies aged 66 from a severe heart attack.
2016
Leonardo DiCaprio wins his first Oscar as best actor for the film The Revenant. He had been nominated four times before without a win
2020
The United States and theTaliban end 18-year war in Afghanistan.