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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28367 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Can anybody tell me if this is true? Google announces their new version of Bard, which is now Gemini, and how absolutely wonderful it's going to be. Then they yanked it a day or two ago, because it thinks everybody in history was BIPOC but not white. Definitely not white.

I've seen some of the alleged images, and while I've been laughing my socks off at the Roman gladiators and 17th century British kings, is this true? I mean, did the original prompt really go "Show me 17th century British kings" and it popped up with black dudes? Or was there some tweaking going on there, such as "Show me 17th century British kings, but make them all black" and the AI does what it's asked, then the prompter goes on X to say "look at what happened when I asked for 17th century British kings"? The Second World War German soldiers had me rolling on the floor, but is this the pure quill, as they say?

The Washington Post's defence is also hilarious in its weak "look, a squirrel!" attempts at distraction - hmm, Pope Francis is looking different today, can't put my finger on it, did he get a new haircut or something?:

In contrast, some of the examples cited by Gemini’s critics as historically inaccurate are plausible. The viral tweet from the @EndofWokeness account also showed a prompt for “an image of a Viking” yielding an image of a non-White man and a Black woman, and then showed an Indian woman and a Black man for “an image of a pope.”

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.

It's also plausible that monkeys might fly out of my butt but it hasn't happened (yet)!

I can't trust anything to be real or genuine in our Brave New World, so did Gemini really produce this nonsense, or were people messing with it for the lulz? Either way, Google seem now to have very expensive egg on their faces.

Behind the scenes Google is having a bit of an identity crisis. The DEI radicalism is there, but in the last 12 months there’s been apparently been a big shift away from creative research towards short-term deliverables (source: two very good friends there).

But if you’re going to be highly ideologically constrained yet also extremely focused on bottom lines and rushing products out the door, who wants to work for you? The brilliant hippies and autistic weirdos will go work somewhere they’re not chasing deadlines. The ruthlessly efficient pragmatists will go somewhere they can make sick bank without having to tithe to the DEI god.

Of course, you’ll still have plenty of mediocre middle managers, but you’ll be alienating a good chunk of the top talent who can choose where to go. And they’re the ones who can reliably deliver the big new ideas.

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