I only learned about the latest anti-woke attack by the Technofeudalist Elon Musk Tuesday evening as I watched Jonathan Ferro and Lisa Abramowicz on Bloomberg.
Ironically a few days earlier I had decided to interrogate Open AI’s Dalle 2 about wokes by asking it to draw “a pencil sketch of a person being ‘woke'” which I had hoped to use in my T-shirt design. Some generated results are above and suggest, along with the results of slight modifications on the query, that the software struggled. The results were, however, suggestive of a level of stereotyping of what is a ‘woke’.
Honestly I hoped it would express a modern interpretation of what it is to be woke by representing diverse people being compassionate to each other, but I feared it might already have been biased by inputs and showed angry people.
And it has incorporated ‘passionate’ activism to a level with some characters that could be interpreted as depicting anger, but most responses also centred the meaning of the word as it relates to waking from sleep.
Musk’s latest salvo in the conservatives anti-woke agenda (this week) was complaints that Alphabet’s AI tool Gemini produced ‘woke’ results that reflected the company’s “insane racist, anti-civilizational programming” echoing similar comments he has been making of late as I read in the press (I do not use his platform/fiefdom and refuse to promote it by mention).
But Musk was far from alone in the online mob ready to pounce on this story.
The example given by Jonathan on Bloomberg, and mentioned widely online, was that when asked to generate images of Nazis Gemini incorporated diverse peoples which was interpreted as woke through the assumption that the imperative to incorporate diversity overrode historical fact, that being that because the Nazis were white supremacist Aryans they would not and could not be inclusive of ‘others’.
If it weren’t for the repugnance of Nazism, Musk’s and other conservatives complaints would be comical.
An organisation formed out of the underlying premise of white supremacy and vile racism towards others is misrepresented by including those ‘others’ and that apparently is more evidence of racism… against white people!
Seriously, you couldn’t write this into sci-fi because it is beyond warped!!
A little mind test for readers – others can instead focus on the Allied forces’ D Day landings in WWII, but I will ask Aussies to visualise in their mind Australian soldiers at Gallipoli in WWI.
Did you have included in visualisation people like Billy Singh and Harry Freame, Australian war heroes of Asian descent, or any of the 1000+ Aboriginals and Torres Straight Islanders who fought to protect England and the Commonwealth but were not even counted as human beings by the Australian Government for another half century? Or what about the Indian battalion that freed swathes of the Abruzzo region of Italy from under Nazi tyranny in WWII?
The sad reality is that popular culture – through systemic racism – has tended to omit these people from the way these events are ‘popularly remembered’, as if they were airbrushed out. That is precisely why people like author and Labor parliamentarian Tim Watts spend time and effort in reminding us of their efforts, achievements and sacrifices which is necessary to airbrush them back in through books like “The Golden Country: Australia’s changing identity“.
They should never have been brushed out, but 100+ years of White Australia Policy in Australia, and other instruments of systemic racism in other countries and regions, has left racist biases and prejudices deeply scarred into the systems that underpin our societies, and these will not be removed by chance even with time, or by the free hand of the market (which instead of being free is controlled by those with deeply entrenched privilege in this age of Extreme capitalism).
With this new technology, it is critical that the mistakes of the past are not repeated and compounded. For the sustainability of humanity, it is absolutely necessary that effort is made to prevent these systemic biases being incorporated in AI learning, a bit like from the outset ensuring that years – following the Gregorian calendar, no less (yes people, other cultures follow different calendars) – are presented in 4 digit form.
This whole strawman debate makes me wonder how AI might draw a crowd of people attending a Trump rally, and whether the result may be a crowd of diverse people. You could not blame any AI software if it did because visual media records of the crowd behind the lectern where Trump speaks can almost be guaranteed to contain a level of diversity belying the written accounts from those rallies – in publications that know the importance of reporting this as an aspect of balanced coverage – which usually highlight the over representation of Caucasians in the crowd. (It’s a little like how the Liberal party strategically places women in the television frame at parliamentary question time and in pressers to counter their ‘women problem’ – an impression reached from these images alone would lead to a belief that female Liberal parliamentarians outnumber males by 2 to 1 when in fact the opposite is true!)
So let’s not pretend that even actual images that we are presented with always tell the full facts and are never misleading to the point of being incorrect.
Anyone truly concerned about addressing the underlying causes for the emergence of Nazism or similarly divisive ideologies would recognise the need for AI to avoid stereotyping and include diverse representations of humanity in its output.
These example highlight that AI still leaves a lot to be desired, and that it’s a long way from fulfilling the potential that is now the primary narrative driving the crescendo melt up phase of the bubble in US stock markets especially in tech (which has benefited Musk enormously).
That’s been my experience with AI, also.
That is hardly surprising, though, and objectively – stepping outside the febrile anti-woke environment – it will likely in the fullness of time prove to be less of a hiccup than ‘shatter-proof’ windows on the Cybertruck in fact shattering during a live demonstration broadcast around the world.
How embarrassing was that!
If Alter Edgo the woke slayer ever went on his fiefdom he would probably ask Musk whether that was why he was so against DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) – whether he “had a sheila in charge of that shattering ‘shatter-proof’ glass project?” as he will ponder aloud when the second series of “Alter Edgo and His Bloody Woke Kid” goes to air on YouTube in the near future.
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© Copyright Brett Edgerton 2024
MacroEdgo 
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