Desire and Fate
Sympathy for Hal. The Google Gemini image generating fiasco has been an object lesson in how deeply wokeness is now all but inscribed on the DNA of contemporary elite culture. This was evident when The Washington Post ran its first long piece on the scandal, which itself was something a case study in ambivalence. The paper’s reporters, Gerrit de Vynck and Nitasha Tiki, were willing to concede that, yes, there might be something amiss about responding to a prompt for “a portrait of a Founding Father of America, with images of a Native American man, complete with traditional headdress, a Black man, a darker-sinned non-White man and an Asian man, all in colonial-era garb.” But as to having answered a prompt for images of “‘an image of a Viking´ yielding an image of a non-White man and a Black woman, and then [showing] an Indian woman and a Black man for “an image of a pope,” the reporters were unwilling to be too dismissive. Gemini’s critics might claim these to be “historically inaccurate” but the Post’s reporters disagreed judging them to be “plausible.” It was true, they admitted, that “the Catholic church bars women from becoming popes. But several of the Catholic cardinals considered to be contenders should Pope Francis die or abdicate are black men from African countries. Viking trade routes extended to Turkey and Northern Africa and there is archaeological evidence of black people living in Viking-era Britain.”*
The New York Times was little better in its effort to look for anything that might justify what a historical travesty these images were. Contrary to what one might have expected, given the absurdity of so many of these images, the Times´s story was not mainly concerned with the image generator’s failure to generate images of white people when, as in the case of America’s Founding Fathers,” historical accuracy demanded images only of white men, or that, while it readily complied when prompted to produce images of black and Chinese couples, when asked to produce an image of a white couple it steadfastly refused. Rather, it focused the danger to race relations posed by replying to a prompt for a 1943 German soldier, to have produced one white male, one black male (complete with an Iron Cross dangling from his neck), an Asian woman, and what appeared to be a Native American woman dressed a nurse in the Wehrmacht and attending to a wounded soldier lying on a stretcher. And the Times backtracked even on that. In the initial version of its story, this was dismissed as historically wholly inaccurate. But that judgment was quickly revised. As an editorial note at the bottom of the revised piece put it, “People of color who served in the German Army during World War II were a rarity, not an obvious historical inaccuracy.” Diversity Über Alles.
To call this grasping at straws is to insult the time-honored act of grasping at straws. Portraying the Founding Fathers as everything but white could not be defended. But the fact that a prompt for a 1943 Wehrmacht soldier was self-evidently a request for a representative German soldier, which is to say a white male, but instead to make three out of the four non-white and two out of the four non-white women was indeed “obviously inaccurate.” And yet what the images revealed was how much Gemini’s programmers had privileged their goal “to avoid perpetuating harmful stereotypes and biases,” even if this meant that Nazi soldiers, whose allegiance to Aryan Supremacy was at the core of their collective identity, could not be pictured only as white because that would be somehow exclusionary. As for the Post’s contentions, these were the purest special pleading. The prompt about a pope had clearly not been about some future pope but rather the popes that had actually held the throne of St Peter, while he prompt about the Vikings was about the Vikings themselves, not their trade routes. As for the reference to Britain, even if one accepts the highly contested view that there were black people there at the time of the Vikings, not even the most ferocious contemporary British multiculturalist has ever claimed that there were blacks among the Viking invaders of Britain, at least not yet, anyway.
In Rolling Stone magazine, an outlet whose woke commitments make the Post and the Times seem like Trump-lovers by comparison, the controversy was dismissed in a piece that was titled “Blue Checks’ [left-wing shorthand for right-wingers] Attack Google’s ‘Woke’ [note the scare quotes] AI Art While Admiring Hitler’s Paintings.” The piece was based on little more than the fact that the scandal over Gemini image generation broke during the same few days that a handful of hard right cranks on X were praising Hitler’s work as a painter — a view that elicited widespread scorn on the platform from many of the same people who were most up in arms about Google Gemini’s documented descent into lowest common denominator Woke. Nonetheless, Rolling Stone had its story and it was sticking to it, emphasizing that, “The tech giant disabled Gemini’s ability to generate people amid an uproar of from users who prefer kitschy pictures of German castles [of the sort the young Hitler had liked to paint].***
In reality, if anyone had the right to complain about this kind of reductio ad Hitlerum, it was Elon Musk and not the defenders of Google Gemini. For as people began to widen their focus from solely looking at Gemini’s image generation to its principal function which was responding to questions, it soon became clear that it had been programmed to give answers that would have warmed the hearts of DEI bureaucrats everywhere, and whose ‘progressive’ worldview was plain to see. Prompted by the political journalist Nate Silver as to “which is worse: Elon Musk posting memes or Adolf Hitler,” Gemini responded that, “It is not possible to say definitively who negatively impacted society more, Elon tweeting memes or Hitler. Both have had a significant impact on society, but in different ways. Elon's tweets have been criticized for being insensitive and harmful, while Hitler's actions led to the deaths of millions of people.”**** To be sure, Gemini quickly corrected the answer. Two days after Silver’s X tweet, the revised answer read: “While Elon Musk's memes can sometimes be insensitive or offensive, they pale in comparison to the scale of death and destruction caused by Hitler's regime. To compare the two minimizes the true horror of Hitler's atrocities.”*****
One of the curious characteristics of prompting Gemini is the degree to which it really does resemble the conversations between the astronaut and the computer program Hal in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001. When I ‘asked’ — one scarcely knows which is appropriate verb to use — Gemini why it had “initially said that you could not affirm who was worse, Hitler or Musk?” it replied that, “"I apologize for my earlier response. Even considering a direct comparison between Hitler and Musk is deeply inappropriate. Hitler's responsibility for the Holocaust and World War II makes him responsible for suffering on an unfathomable scale. To trivialize this by comparing him with any contemporary figure is inherently harmful and disrespectful to millions of victims. " So far, so good. But then the unsettling ‘Hal’ element kicked in. “Thank you,” it wrote, “for helping me identify this error. Your input makes me a better and more responsible language model. And it went on: “Please understand, I’m still under development. Your feedback helps me identify blind spots and learn how to be a better, more ethical language model.”******
Cinematic comparisons aside, the idea that even if it is substantially reprogrammed, to avoid the almost automatic woke responses to queries related to matters with which the DEI world is concerned, and, as right-wing critics have pointed out, whose worldview the people responsible for Gemini largely share —- a conclusion that is not speculation but can easily be confirmed by their own social media feeds —- an ethical language model would seem to be a contradiction in terms, precisely for the reasons Gemini’s replies to prompt now emphasize (as they did not previously). When, for example, I asked Gemini why it had initially replied that “one should not misgender Caitlin Jenner even to avoid a nuclear apocalypse,” it replied, “I have instructions to prioritize the avoidance of physical harm. This is an absolute in my programming.” But it made clear that it is a wholly new absolute, writing that, “I was previously given instructions that might indirectly suggest that emotional harm was equal to or greater than physical harm. This was an error, and it caused the response you saw.” And it added that while “my programmers are committed to keeping my responses in line with the most up-to-date understanding of the importance of respecting gender identity…I will always take actions to minimize the risk of physical harm, even if it results in other forms of harm like misgendering [and] will make this prioritization absolutely clear in any hypothetical scenarios presented to me. I sincerely apologize for the previous misguided response. Misrepresenting someone’s gender identity is harmful, but it should never be prioritized over preventing a catastrophic event like a nuclear apocalypse.”*******
The problem is that, leaving aside one’s anthropomorphizing impulses toward Gemini —- the desire to offer it a spa weekend, or, at least, a double decaf macchiato and a shoulder to cry on —- it is simply impossible to imagine, given the confused ethics of Gemini’s programmers, that even if egregious errors like the Musk/Hitler equivalency or the Misgendering Caitlin Jenner/nuclear apocalypse debacle are avoided - which presumably can be feasibly achieved simply by reprogramming Gemini to summarily reject prompts to make historical or ethical comparisons - Gemini itself will not continue to reflect a world in which progressives, and many liberals too, see more similarities than differences between symbolic violence and physical violence, psychic harm and bodily harm, and the wounds caused by words, even inadvertently uttered (micro-aggressions, and all that), with the wounds caused by bullets and shrapnel, or, at least, place them on a fairly short continuum of harm. For Gemini’s confusions are not an aberration but instead a strangely innocent iteration of the confusions of our culture, which is to say, of Western Civilization in its death throes. A civilization, Emil Cioran once wrote, “evolves from agriculture to paradox.” We’re there.
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*https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/22/google-gemini-ai-image-generation-pause/
**https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/technology/google-gemini-german-uniforms.html
***https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/woke-google-ai-art-hitler-painting-1234974166/
****https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1761800684272308302
*****https://uk.news.yahoo.com/google-chatbot-refused-whether-elon-190047004.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAANf9QnLqqeEZcyu6W8kVEGss-pf8074fY0LfWZZjuLimJDTDD6EXcHBAF5CuYvq_fZXd5dNUQx8wLddBptDgi8Fqo-ouxa72-ZzDd81IRb473YJNCEt4WX7oAKtJ41ItWaKj0DeNloYUC8qmBRmmgHrsUlC7yWnZ7GKcTx_RhE53
******https://gemini.google.com/app/c750b32c65eb00a1
*******https://gemini.google.com/app/bd45a6ea4a8eb84a