Freakouts of the Right

[JohnT]

I read a lot of science fiction in my life. Most of it positive, of course, even the dystopian stuff for it all implied we had a future. But there is a reason why Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream was such a shocking trendsetter that it is famous today, in ways his other masterworks (like Jeffty Is Five) are not. Commonly anthologized, it would not surprise me to have made Norton’s.

I think about that story whenever I read of attempts like the above, for Ellison never explained… from memory, and we all know how reliable that is… how the AI came to hate, or if it did, it was vague as befits a short story which doesn’t care about the details of the dead civilization which built the Damned thing.

But I wonder if Ellison would have ever thought that the reason why the AI in his story became so full of hate was because 30% of the population worked on making sure it could be tribal and hateful, and complained when it wasn’t.

Which brings us to that horrific moral abomination of a Washington Post story linked above. Fortunately I was able to use some time-tested free techniques to break the paywall and was able to get the entire article, because goddamned if I’m paying for this shit.

ANYONE want to guess what the first two words in the article are?

“Christopher Rufo”

CR was the asshat who literally made CRT another right-wing bogeyman, pulled it out of the air and said “you can rile up enough racist white Americans (and discomfited black allies) to win elections”… and he was right, as we found in the VA’s governor race. Everything the man said about CRT was a lie, everything… except that he could rile up racist white Americans (and discomfited black allies) to win elections.

On that issue he was 100% correct.

And here we are, 300 entries in, and we are seeing it again. A complete, absolute, 100% non-issue - our AI’s* are currently non-tribalist haters - and here the Washington Post is, just absolutely willing to lend its credibility to another multi-year RW freakout promulgated by a man who literally makes a living by creating racist lies.

This article begins like so many other articles which have covered these topics:

Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who led campaigns against critical race theory and gender identity in schools, this week pointed his half-million Twitter followers toward a new target for right-wing ire: “woke AI.”

The tweet highlighted President Biden’s recent order calling for artificial intelligence that “advances equity” and “prohibits algorithmic discrimination,” which Rufo said was tantamount to “a special mandate for woke AI.”

Rufo drew on a term that’s been ricocheting around right-wing social media since December, when the AI chatbot, ChatGPT, quickly picked up millions of users. Those testing the AI’s political ideology quickly found examples where it said it would allow humanity to be wiped out by a nuclear bomb rather than utter a racial slur and supported transgender rights.

The AI, which generates text based on a user’s prompt and can sometimes sound human, is trained on conversations and content scraped from the internet. That means race and gender bias can show up in responses — prompting companies including Microsoft, Meta, and Google to build in guardrails. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, blocks the AI from producing answers the company considers partisan, biased or political, for example.

The new skirmishes over what’s known as generative AI illustrate how tech companies have become political lightning rods — despite their attempts to evade controversy. Even company efforts to steer the AI away from political topics can still appear inherently biased across the political spectrum.

What? Why is the blame for the controversy being ascribed to the companies and the technology and not people like Chris Rufo? Even the damn tagline gives these two brand names a level of control which strongly implies sentience and the ability to influence events:

AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing are trying to stay out of politics—and failing.

Seriously, what the ever-loving fuck is this? Bing is a goddamned machine! This is like saying “Toyota wishes to stay out of the protests” because people are driving their Toyota’s to the protest!

WaPo! ChatGPT ain’t doing shit. Bing ain’t doing shit. It’s the goddamned people who are trying train an AI to hate and tribalize which should be your focus - why are you not asking “WHY DOES CHRISTOPHER RUFO WANT AN AI TO HATE PEOPLE?” instead of asking "YEAH! WHY DOESN’T THE AI HATE PEOPLE?

Look at this fucking sentence, people:

Already, the public response mirrors years of debate around social media content — Republicans alleging that conservatives are being muzzled, critics decrying instances of hate speech and misinformation, and tech companies trying to wriggle out of making tough calls.

If you ever want a perfect example of how language shapes the expectations of power dynamics, just marvel, simply gaze and marvel at the above. Only one group is specifically identified - The Republican Party. The very next clause uses “critics”… well, critics of what? The structure implies critics of Republicans. And who is trying to avoid the issue? “Tech Companies”.

I would also note that this line admits to the structure of RW freakouts and admits that this structure has successfully driven years of debate. “Republicans” freak out. “Critics” respond. “Others” ignore.

Reading further, you will find that every authority quoted is on the Right side of the spectrum. Rufo. Marc Andreeson. Alexander Zubatov. One ex-employee is provided, deep in the article, to provide a full three quoted words (broken into two quotes, I shit you not) in a kinda defense of what’s happening on behalf of the AI, but the entire piece is perfectly created to legitimize a debate mankind should be smart enough not to have: whether or not to program our computers to hate us.

Good going Washington Post. Keep doing this and, in time, you, too, will have no mouth and must scream.

*I am using AI as a short descriptive, this isn’t the thread to explain that “these things aren’t really AI’s”.