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Notes -
Gemini's Cave
One of the most famous allegories in history is that of Plato's Cave:
It is astonishing that Plato imagined the form of cultural transmission through projected imagery thousands of years before the creation of the movie theater: the dark room, the audience facing the screen, the projection of light and sound from a hidden source... Movie-going audiences tend to be oblivious to the esoteric artistic motivations and meaning behind the films they watch and reify, also tracking with Plato's allegory.
One thing that is not clearly defined in Plato's allegory is, who are the people behind the wall controlling the puppets and creating the sounds to manipulate the audience's perception of reality? What is motivating them? What happens when the audience catches on to the game being played? In Plato's allegory, such a person who leaves the cave, perceives reality, and then tries to convince his fellow prisoners of the state of affairs is taken as a madman and killed by the other prisoners.
With the growing likelihood of Generative AI fulfilling this role of the people behind the wall, there are Glitches in the Matrix so to speak. Twitter has caught on to Gemini's apparent refusal to depict White people. Whether it's Popes or "Medieval Knights", or "Vikings", "American Founding Fathers", "White families", "British, America, etc. women", "Glamour shots", etc.
The AI Engineer at Google behind Gemini has responded:
There is no doubt that this is the worst Gemini, and all the other technologies, are going to be at this. The nonsense above will, for the most part, be fixed very quickly. The real danger will be when Gemini and other Generative AI become so good at generating cultural images and motion pictures, with their output influenced by this latent anti-White alignment which is called "AI Safety", that the agenda behind the underlying alignment will be nearly imperceptible. It will influence the creation of culture and art in subtle ways, and you will be considered a madman conspiracy theorist if you conclude that there are people tuning this culture to be anti-White in the most effective way possible. Imagine when anti-White alignment doesn't create the nonsense above, but it creates extremely entertaining and compelling movies and stories that actually have plausible deniability, such that you seem like a madman if you perceive an agenda aligning the content in such a way.
But for now, and not for long, we can recognize "no, we aren't madmen conspiracy theorists, they are trying to tune the culture to be anti-White and the newest methods for doing that are simply not completely refined yet" is clear as day, and as clear as it's ever going to be.
Per your ideology, what’s the difference between the compelling progressive images and films currently created by Hollywood and the same created by AI? It doesn’t seem to me that Sam Altman or Sundar Pichai are more progressive than Reed Hastings or Bob Iger or Dave Zaslav.
I suppose the argument might be that AI could be even better than Hollywood at making compelling content, but Hollywood seems good enough to propagate the California ideology already.
To be clear, the entertainment industry’s message for working class whites/red tribers is mostly not things right wing culture warriors complain about. The country music songs about how military service is awesome and having a family is worth being poor and even low status jobs are worth taking pride in come from the exact same entertainment industry as things like R&B. American Sniper was a major studio production.
I think the balance of evidence is, if we accept a priori that mainstream media is pushing an agenda as opposed to primarily a business, that the elites want a largely white peasantry, but also don’t really want those peasants to have much say. Sure, that’s worth complaining about from the perspective of a prospective peasant, but it’s not exactly white genocide.
I remember awhile back I was arguing with someone here who was denying that Knives Out, which entailed a Hispanic immigrant disinheriting a white family from their family house, was actually a celebration of demographic replacement. Even with the final shot of her holding a mug on the balcony that says "my house", looking down on the white family that lost their inheritance to her...
People love that movie! If Hollywood can create a movie that is fundamentally a celebration of the demographic replacement of White people, and people love it and applaud it, then AI will be able to do better. And good luck getting Gemini to create a compelling move or story that turns the tables on a story like this, it will just refuse to do so.
The ‘hero’ in the movie is Daniel Craig playing a white Southern gentleman. And the maid - Ana de Armas - is surely white unless you really take the ‘Africa begins at the Pyrenees’ definition. Her grandparents immigrated to Cuba from the north of Spain and her parents were part of the white upper class in the Cuban caste system (which persists, of course, even under communism).
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I think Rian Johnson did in the end consider making the hero of the story a white man a bit of a mistake, and the beginning of Glass Onion is partially an attempt to recitfy it.
(Blanc is revealed to be gay. So he's still whate, still male, but he's not all bad, see?)
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This is exactly what I'm talking about 2rafa, Hollywood films are sophisticated enough that someone like you can come along and say "you're being paranoid, look Daniel Craig is a hero of the film and he's white and likable, and the maid is white-passing."
Whereas with Gemini, they let the mask slip, you cannot doubt that the content is being directed to diminish the representation of white people in the prompts. Although eventually they will also improve the output such that people like you will be able to respond the same way- "no, no, there's no anti-White alignment here because this character who helps the POC win the inheritance is white, etc."
You may have forgotten scenes like this:
Of course, the final shot of the film is Marta looking down from the balcony with a mug that says "My House."
The casting of Marta is part of the subversive intelligence of the film. Marta is an avatar for demographic change. The fact they choose a white-passing upper-caste beautiful actress instead of, say, the median Guatemalan, is part of the intelligence of the film. You are more attracted to her, she is less foreign-appearing, she becomes the "face" of demographic change to the audience, which is directed to support her (and through the hero played by Daniel Craig). AI is going to employ similar techniques, and we already see it with the images Gemini is rendering. And when they get batter at it, you are going to say "that's not the message of the film, look at how the white character helps the POC win the day at the end! No subversion here!"
I’m not accusing you of being paranoid and I largely agree with your original point. Knives Out is a progressive propaganda movie, but it’s on the basis of class rather than race. The family don’t have their unearned wealth because they’re white (they’re not descendants of slaveowners or something) but because of their mystery novelist father’s capitalist success. The message of the movie is that the son does not deserve the wealth of the father, that inheritance is inherently unjust, that the generational transfer of wealth is not just arbitrary but unfair and must be corrected. Sure, there’s some progressive waffle about immigration and race and the alt right son, though that’s largely played for laughs in front of a progressive audience. But the core of the message is essentially Occupy Wall Street, Wealth Tax Now. There have always been white hispanics in Hollywood, but I can’t imagine someone’s aesthetic sympathy for Mayans is improved by the casting of a Spanish actress in this movie; most Americans encounter illegal migrants at least somewhat regularly; they don’t look like Ana de Armas.
I think if every movie and TV show depicts hispanic migrants as attractive, intelligent, caring etc. that people will pick up on that and be influenced by it even if it doesn't match with what they see in their every day lives. Most people in the Soviet Union knew factory workers and they didn't look like the 10/10 on the propaganda poster. Of course that was laughably primitive compared to what Hollywood can do but the principle still holds.
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The actress may be one thing, but the character is another.
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I really didn't like Knives Out because of how simplistic the plot felt to me. I never really thought about race in that movie. But I've heard someone say they liked that you could tell if someone is racist because they've disliked that movie. It broke my brain enough (and I was basically "outing" myself as a racist if I questioned this) that I didn't try to get any elaboration.
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