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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Gemini's Cave

One of the most famous allegories in history is that of Plato's Cave:

Plato begins by having Socrates ask Glaucon to imagine a cave where people have been imprisoned from childhood, but not from birth. These prisoners are chained so that their legs and necks are fixed, forcing them to gaze at the wall in front of them and not to look around at the cave, each other, or themselves. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway with a low wall, behind which people walk carrying objects or puppets "of men and other living things".

The people walk behind the wall so their bodies do not cast shadows for the prisoners to see, but the objects they carry do ("just as puppet showmen have screens in front of them at which they work their puppets"). The prisoners cannot see any of what is happening behind them; they are only able to see the shadows cast upon the cave wall in front of them. The sounds of the people talking echo off the walls; the prisoners believe these sounds come from the shadows.

Socrates suggests that the shadows are reality for the prisoners because they have never seen anything else; they do not realize that what they see are shadows of objects in front of a fire, much less that these objects are inspired by real things outside the cave which they do not see.

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:

We are aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions, and we are working to fix this immediately.

As part of our AI principles https://ai.google/responsibility/principles/, we design our image generation capabilities to reflect our global user base, and we take representation and bias seriously.

We will continue to do this for open ended prompts (images of a person walking a dog are universal!)

Historical contexts have more nuance to them and we will further tune to accommodate that.

This is part of the alignment process - iteration on feedback. Thank you and keep it coming!

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.

(nitter links)

Are these broken for anyone else? I've heard nitter is dead due to API changes.

Not completely dead yet. Many instances have essentially died but some instances have resorted to directly using accounts for scraping and are buying in them in bulk. Of course, this is expensive as those accounts will eventually get banned sooner or later.