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Gemini is not getting history wrong by accident. It is rewriting history on purpose.

We’ve got one of those needy TVs that gets jealous when you stop looking at them.

If you neglect to watch for too long, say by pausing Netflix, or hanging around in the menu, it gets annoyed and attempts to entice you back by flashing up irresistible photos of your own children. From the days when they were still small and adorable, before you’d ever had to nurse them through their first vodka hangover. Or warn them not to keep leaving their lighter and filters out, where their mum might find them.

I’m not exactly sure how it does this. I’ve obviously changed a setting somewhere, and now my TV is linked to an online repository of family photos.

Regular readers might expect me to be cynical about this. But I’m not. It’s brilliant.

Every day, at random points, cute photos of my kids are flashed up, in 50 inch, HDR glory, informing me in no uncertain terms that, sure, you haven’t achieved much in your nonsense life. But you have achieved this.

Whenever these enchanting ghosts appear, my now teenage girls are, by degrees, embarrassed, delighted and transfixed. ‘I loved that dress’, they might say. Or ‘I can’t believe I was ever that cute’. And, ‘OMG look at that haircut!’

Or simply, ‘I really remember that’.

But do they? Really? Sometimes the little girl on screen is so little, so scrunched up and tiny, fat armed and doughy, wide eyed, and mesmerised by the delightful mundanity of everyday life, that I doubt an actual memory of being her can really exist.

Sure in their brain my teenagers are experiencing a memory. But in all likelihood it is actually the recollection of seeing this same photograph before, and recalling the often told, bite size tale, the vignette of their early life, which accompanies it.

They are not so much summoning a memory, as creating their own past. Writing a story into their subconscious, to make sense of a photo, an image. And over time that story, that version of the past, becomes reality. It becomes the Truth.

Which makes sense. Because apparently, that’s how memory works.

A lot has been written about the disaster, the ridiculous self owning catastrophe, the hilariously inept unforced error that is Google Gemini. The Google AI with the Prime Directive to turn all of human existence into one long, Black History Month.

To be honest, I’m a bit late to the party. So I’m not going to post any of the most egregious examples here. The black SS storm troopers. The multi racial jousters. The female Hindu Pope. All were totally bonkers. Although to be fair, not that long ago, real life history did throw up a pope who had once been a member of the Hitler Youth, so there’s that.

But I do want to talk about Google Gemini and what I think it reveals about where the progressive Big Tech machine, which, allied to Big Government, seems to run more and more of our lives, is headed.

But let’s back up a little. According to most of the coverage around the Gemini fiasco, this is a story about AI making mistakes.

It concerns a weirdly woke, but ultimately well meaning, attempt to eradicate bias and bigotry from a cutting edge machine. About how that experiment over reached, and revealed its hand.

Like a toaster which has been reprogrammed by Black Lives Matter, and now refuses to toast white bread.

But Gemini is not getting history wrong by accident. It is rewriting history on purpose.

It’s as if Google had shown Gemini the last few seasons of Dr Who. And said ‘Yeah. Basically just do that’.

And this rewriting of history is not about to stop, just because of a couple of articles in the Daily Mail, and a week long festival of contempt, fury and hilarity on Substack.

Because this isn’t about Google spewing out a series of ridiculous images onto the internet.  Of filling our screens with a Guardian reader’s fantasy version of history. Of a rogue AI gone wonky.

This is part of a wider and more systematic process. A steady, deliberate and insidious attempt to reforge our collective memories into a version of the past that is palatable to our progressive elites.

How many of the founding fathers were black guys? Two? Three? None? According to Google Gemini, it might be pretty much all of them.

The only reason I know the Founding Fathers were actually a bunch of white men is that I have a (very) basic understanding of American history. And because when I look it up on the internet, I usually get shown a picture of some white men standing around a table, in rather attractive tights.

But what happens when kids stop being taught about the Founding Fathers at school? Or when you look them up online, and the first three pages you get, just show you the cast of Hamilton?

Who is going to know what they really looked like then?

I suppose you could find out by visiting a museum. Or god forbid, by looking them up in a book.

But in ten, fifteen years time, no one will be looking in actual books. Not just because they are boring, expensive and heavy. But because someone angry will have pointed out that JK Rowling wrote books, and used that as justification to have them all burned.

And by then, all the digital, online editions will have been ‘modernised’, retroactively bleached of harmful, hateful content by latter day Winston Smiths.

It’s already happened to Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming and Dr Seuss.  All of whom have had their work ‘improved’ by pearl clutching sensitivity readers.

Also by then, all the museums will either be closed, or even worse, converted into joyless and sterile  ‘Interactive Anti-Colonialist Learning Experiences’. Their new mission, to challenge and interrogate the racism of our imperial past and call for reparations for the harm our ever-guilty ancestors caused with their lumbering great jackboots of white supremacy.

Though I bet they’ll still somehow manage to find plenty ways to rinse tourists in the gift shop.

Again. It’s happening already. The Wellcome Collection is gone, the British Maritime Museum hosts a hectoring indigenous god, and shies away from celebrating our navy’s once glorious victories.

In time, the notion that the Founding Fathers were all white men will become lost, obscured, and most importantly, irrelevant.

Because here’s the thing? Who really, I mean really cares what the Founding Fathers looked like anyway? Apart from historians, pub quiz bores, and incoherently frothing, far right lunatic conspiracy theorists on Substack?

Who cares if your AI creates black Vikings, asian Anne Boleyns, or multiethnic Knights of the Round Table?

No one. And if the past we are creating is more diverse, equitable and inclusive than the one we are replacing, then it’s all for the good, right?

I mean, everyone seems to love Bridgerton. And why not? It’s a cracking show.

Who could be against that? They ask. Only a racist, they say. But you don’t seem very comfortable with it. So maybe you’re a racist. Are you a racist? No? Well sorry, but that sounds a lot like the sort of thing a racist would say.

And so, scared of being branded racist, I expect we’ll all eventually do what we’re supposed to. Stop noticing, and just shut up going on about it.

It’s instructive that there has been so little push back against the bigotry of Google Gemini.

Sure, there have been plenty of mainstream comment about the disaster. But much of it has carried an exasperated, world weary tone. ‘Really?’ It seems to sigh,  ‘What the hell is Woke up to now?’

And that makes sense. The progressives have already claimed men are women, Jews don’t count, segregation is good, and kids are sexy. So after all that, a black George Washington, maybe doesn’t seem quite such a big deal.

But it’s worth remembering, Google Gemini is not being foolishly, erroneously, hilariously, unknowingly racist. Like an outrageously drunk Christmas nana, or a blacked up Justin Trudeau. It is just being racist. On purpose. When it refuses to create an image of a happy white family, but obligingly produces a picture of a happy black one, it can be little else.

Imagine for a moment the counter factual. The universal condemnation, the tsunami of disapproval, the unstoppable shareholder rebellion, which would have been visited upon a tech giant which had rolled out, for public consumption, an AI which systematically, comprehensively and blatantly erased black people.

A version of Google Gemini which refused to create an image of a black family lest it offend its users’ delicate sensibilities. Which portrayed Barack Obama as a pasty faced Nicholas Lyndhurst in a cool suit. Which, when asked for a picture of American Civil Rights leaders, conjured up an image of The Derry Girls. Or showed ‘a young Michael Jackson’ as someone resembling an old Michael Jackson.

The tech company responsible would have (rightly ) faced accusations of unacceptable, flagrant bias. Of institutional, systemic racism. Of attempting some form of digital genocide. (Always with the genocide) Such a company would have no doubt faced not just censure, but potential bankruptcy, and ruin.

But in real life, because it’s white people being erased. Well, it’s just a glitch. Teething troubles. A gremlin. A forgivable mistake.

In response to his company’s failure, plucky Google boss Sundar Pichai  said,

'No Al is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry's development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes.’ 

I’m no Alan Turing, but I’m not sure, ‘Don’t make a racist computer’, is a particularly high bar.

Pichai also makes it sound like there is a lot of work ahead. That it will take six months of twenty four hour debuggery by top boffins in the Google IT department to fix the error, to exorcise this ghost from the machine.

But it won’t. As I understand it, this fantasy version of the past wasn’t a result of technical errors buried deep in impenetrable code. It was right there on top.

Gemini essentially just added the words ‘….and make it diverse’ to the end of every request.

Similarly, when anyone asked for ‘white people’. The racism alarms went off, and computer said ‘No’.

It’s not exactly Skynet.

So now that it knows where the hard boundary is, somewhere between a black female King Arthur, and a Chinese Nazi, Google will just go back and make these modifiers a little less upfront. A bit more subtle.

Maybe, next time only three of the six 17th century European scientists will be asian women. Which is better. Right?

There won’t be so much pushback to this new iteration. Maybe a couple of moans here and there, but slowly our collective cultural memory will adjust, and begin to accept these as images of the past, as at least a passable version of the truth.

And our history will be overwritten.

Look, I’m aware that perhaps I’m going too far. Reading too much intention into what was a simple error. And that just as they are distorting the past with Google Gemini, maybe I’m guilty of reframing the present, with hyperbole. Fair enough.

Usually I do try to favour cock up over conspiracy. I find it’s better for my sanity.

But I might not be so prone to overreaction if Gemini wasn’t simply the latest and most obvious example of an increasingly common phenomenon.

This isn’t the first, or even worst, example of our history being rewritten to better reflect the obsessions of our ruling class.

It’s everywhere. First, a biggie.

People assume that the UK Covid Inquiry is an attempt to get to the facts behind the policies and decisions which led to lockdown. To inquire into the data, interrogate the participants, and ascertain the truth.

It isn’t. It is the process of cementing a fiction into the public record. Forever.

It is spending £500 million to make it our official history that the UK didn’t lockdown fast enough, or hard enough. That covid threatened everyone equally. That lockdowns were necessary and effective. And that masks worked.

Despite the fact that none of this is true.

And now it turns out. Seven out of ten scientists didn’t even believe ‘The Science’.

Every day, often in subtle ways, our stories are being revised, reinterpreted, retconned and improved to better reflect the preferences, prejudices, and preoccupations of the woke elite.

Cleopatra was a black woman. Roman Emperor Elagabalus was trans.

Hadrians Wall is gay. Mary Seacole’s reputation rivalled that of Florence Nightingale.

In pre history, women were the hunters

Our governments really believed Saddam had WMDs. Joe Biden has always been an anti racist.

Liz Truss bankrupted Britain. Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.

January Sixth was an insurrection.

It’s history as Manichean morality play, no longer populated by real three dimensional human beings, but now simply featuring a cast of goodies and baddies.

All our heroes are being remade as villains.

Churchill as a Nazi. Nelson a xenophobe. Jefferson as little more than a slaver. Hugh Edwards as, well, whatever the hell that was.

While our villains are rehabilitated. Mao had the right idea. Hamas terrorists are celebrated. And the TikTok kids think Osama Bin Laden is, like, totally leng.

The aim is not to reinterpret history, but to replace it. With History 2.0.

The past, yes, but now new, and improved.

Denuded of nuance, shorn of all complexity, and scrubbed clean of moral ambiguity. The past reconstructed to better fit with the senseless sensibilities, the identitarian religion, of today’s progressive elite.

The long march through the institutions is pretty much complete. Welcome, to the long march through our history.

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