“Think of the Poorest Person You Have Ever Seen, And Ask Whether Your Next Act Will Be of Any Use”
The headline here comes from Gandhi, or was ascribed to him, I don’t care which. This wearying “woke Google AI” story brought it immediately to mind.
You have certainly been made aware of the Google Gemini fracas; Google’s image-generation system, clearly engineered with exquisite sensitivity towards the possibility of sparking racial controversy, has ignited one in the opposite direction. No doubt inspired by bad PR from past racially-inflammatory results of Google searches, like those outlined here, Google tilted its LLM so heavily towards “representation” of racial minorities that it has been close to impossible to generate a white person even for those prompts where only that outcome would have made sense. (They have since gone back to the lab to produce less polarizing results.) There’s been a range of responses to this, most quite predictable, a good deal of it involving disingenuous Matt Walsh types railing about anti-whiteness. Some progressives are falling right in the trap of anti-politics and defending the AI, though from my vantage, more aren’t. I think even most liberals understand that while this probably isn’t worth getting upset over, it’s definitely not worth defending, either.
I would urge those who are trying to generate a backlash to the backlash, the liberals who think they must go to the battlements to defend literally anything criticized by conservatives, to consider two things. If nothing else, bear in mind that an image generator that has its thumb so heavily on the scale is less useful for users of all races. (A Black kid who wants an image of a typical Scandinavian Viking for a history paper is not helped here.) More importantly, think of Gandhi’s advice - who is this helping? A Google muckety-muck said explicitly that this kind of AI training is an anti-racist effort. But… what racism does it actually fight? Which Black person’s life is improved by pretending that there were Black Vikings? And this points to far broader and more important questions. We live in a world where fighting racism has gone from fighting for an economy where all Black families can put food on the table to white people acknowledging the land rights of dead Native Americans before they give conference panels about how to maximize synergy in corporate workflow. In a world of affinity groups, diversity pledges, and an obsession with language that tests the boundaries of the possible, we have to ask ourselves hard questions about what any of it actually accomplishes. Who is all of this shit for?