Damn right LSO but speaking as someone born in the 50's I can sadly tell you that Leftist/Marxist brainwashing and subversion has been with us for a very long time, and it's been more subtle in the past. Google's AI has done us a big favour by being clumsy but the more subtle brainwashing is more insidious. 'Lying by omission' is the BBC/Hollywood's top technique. Thus we have endless films made about evil Nazis...but how many films about the horrors of Communism, which tortured and destroyed even more people? How many people are familiar with what went on in Soviet Russia for 70 blood soaked years? Or how Mao's China functioned? Or what Communism did to people in Eastern Europe? Or what the Viet Cong did to people who tried to fight Marxism. And how many young people know what motivated Pol Pot who was taught Communism in a Paris university and went on to cause the slaughter of 2 million Cambodians IN OUR LIFETIMES in the 1970's. Communism is alive and well everywhere in the bullsh*t idiotic politics of the Woke generation, Stalin's Useful Idiots loving every suicidal 'radical' change they swallow. Except none of it is radical, it's all been done before, with massive body counts.
100% agree with this comment Mrs Bucket. The fact it is less subtle is very worrying. It means that communist propaganda etc (I don’t like the term ‘brainwashing’ it implies, I think, that the masses are little more clay to be moulded just as censorious authoritarians claim. And that doesn’t chime with my pro human views) is more upfront than ever. Because I fear, it has become normalised and acceptable. Lying by omission does seem to be the big one. So much is not reported, or dismissed as outliers, non representative or edge cases.
Yes....and then there's what to my mind is the most subversive brainwashing of all.... the insidious lies embedded into television drama serials: "Having watched so much tv drama, I am often struck with how little attention it gets in journalistic commentary on media bias. Yes ‘The News’ and ‘Current Affairs’ is biased; how could it not be, given its inevitable editorial selectivity. (Some murders warrant weeks of agonising and outrage while others never get a mention – some stories ‘trend’ and others fail to ‘capture the public imagination’ etc etc.) But political bias in tv drama (precisely because it is ostensibly apolitical) is actually more insidious – and its subliminal messaging all the more powerful. The article that follows was written a few years ago and so has examples of tv dramas from that time. But in essence it is just as relevant to 2023......... " https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining
Just sat down to read this properly, EXCEPTIONAL GRAHAM! Another Substack for my HQ file (High Quality). There really are some great writers on Substack.
1950s? Same for me. I'm feeling too old now and it seems hopeless to try and lead younger people who have no history and therefore no historical perspective. Try explaining petrol to the new cavemen. Try explaining electricity. Like water it comes out of the wall.
Fully agree on this point LSO, I too have a couple of teenage children and both are very aware of the duplicity and undermining of 'truth' that goes on in the media and online. The current university age are fully paid up members of the Woke Church (forgive the generalisation) but those in the 13-18 range now are more based than ever I think. There is hope!
"Like a toaster which has been reprogrammed by Black Lives Matter, and now refuses to toast white bread" 😂
I wouldn't worry - our Glorious Net Zero Future will mean that no-one will have any electricity to re-charge their phones or laptops (even if they have batteries to re-charge) and....... we're blowing the dust off those old books 😃
Ha thanks Bettina! Yes I’m still buying cds and records and have halted plans to dump my dvd collection. But I hadn’t considered that we won’t have any electricity. So I guess you’re right. Time to dig out the Harry Potter collection.
I'm sure you know, Bettina, that the plan is to generate electricity from wind energy and solar energy — nuclear energy even. There will be plenty of electricity. There will just be less carbon dioxide going up to the skies.
They better go back to 1990 and start building those nuclear power plants then Ragged!
I’d be totally on board if they said we’re going full nuclear with supplements from wind and solar etc. And we will make a transition from fossil to these other generators, as and when, they come on board at scale. But that’s not what they are doing at all.
They are shutting down things that work, and replacing them with things that don’t. While ignoring the shortfall. The maths just dont add up.
I find Robert Bryce on Substack very clearheaded and not at all ideological about all this.
To me, the scariest thing is that - even assuming that Google want to rectify this embarrassing WokeAI reality rewriter - they COULDN'T....not without sacking 90% of their workforce. It's like conservatives saying "the government should do this...." and "the government should do that...."etc, thereby missing the point that (even if we had a decent government) the 100% Lefty civil service machine would strangle any Right-wing policy agenda at birth.
You’re right Graham. They obviously knew this could happen. But went with it anyway. As you say the issue isn’t really what the machine is doing, it’s the culture at these Big Tech companies which thinks it is acceptable. I agree with you about the civil service. But I do think the Tories are using it, just like they used to do with the EU, as a convenient cover for their own ineptitude.
Yes absolutely. I read someone recently describe the current Tory Party as "an unmanageably wide coalition" (or some wording like that). In other words....a spectrum all the way from real conservatives to further-left-than-Tony Blair-types. I think that is its tragedy.
Come on my British cousins, don’t give up! Conservatives just need to get back to basics and be unafraid - remember who they are!
You can never get rid of a bully by bending a knee- you have to punch them hard in the nose. Your woke fellow citizens are basically children without logic or facts on their side. Wimpy little crybabies at heart.
What I (and I think Low Status) meant is that - for a viable Conservative party to emerge - the current Tory parliamentary party needs to split..... so as to get rid of its quasi-woke MPs (and there are currently quite a lot of them).
I think the republicans are already splitting. It may not be enough but it gives one hope. It is past time for change in both parties. Remember I voted libertarian for most of my life which is idealistically a bit of both parties.
But, it takes some folks to have the courage to say- I don’t care what you call me, you are wrong.
A conservative think tank here has already gathered great like minds to put a plan together to implement the changes needed to get back to the basics of the role of government in our everyday lives.
Biden is the most corrupt president in history of our nation. A puppet president obviously. Polls show 82 percent think he is too old. Wrong question, the problem is not so much his age as his dementia.
Anyway, we are all living in extreme strange times. Google AI says white people are too dangerous to display, too racist to acknowledge. The hypocrisy is mind numbing.
Yes Deidre, I agree with your call for’ Back to basics’ in terms of what we should expect from our governments. They seem to fiddle at the edges, poking their noses into our everyday lives while failing to do the most basic tasks. Biden is just mortifying. It’s so weird that the same people who label Trump an embarrassment are ready to accept a guy who can’t remember when he was vice president of the United States.
I think you are mistaken about Google, Graham. I have lots of friends at Google. Most are not woke. The team that built Gemini is woke for sure (I’ll write more about that in a sec) but most people at Google are just regular lefties and most lefties are not woke.
I think this is an important fact to grasp. Most of us lefties can’t possibly vote for the malevolent conman who leads the republican party or the incompetent bandits in the Reform Party or the imbeciles in the conservative party but we, like you, still want to end wokeness and identity politics as a blight on our society. When you (not specifically you, Graham, but many of the commentators here) assume that we lefties are infected witht same blight as the people who made Gemini or run sociology departments at university, you poison a potential alliance. Most lefties are good people who disagree with you on climate and economics and the best way to provide essential services. Most of us are not woke.
I think that’s fair about Google Ragged. And obviously you have insider knowledge. I haven’t worked there, but I have worked at the BBC and I see a similar dynamic at play. The institution, the system is woke, but most people arent, they just go along with it.
We do indeed need to form an ‘anti woke’ (for want of a better term) alliance. But I would say that the mainstream left has very much facilitated and promoted these excesses. There are a few on the Labour benches who have stood up against some of it, I’m thinking Rosie Duffield and Luciana Berger but they are soon cast out. (Berger has rejoined I know). The madness of having something like a man being the UN representative for women, or men in women’s prisons/changing rooms would never have happened if the ‘normal lefties’ had said no. If there is a clear distinction between the left and the progressives I don’t really see it. I do see a realignment though, and maybe these terms, left and right are losing their usefulness.
Matt Yglesias has a good post today about how the Dems in America went along with wokeness, not because they believed in it but because they thought it would win them votes. Yglesias thinks the Dems have seen the error of their ways and we (they) have passed peak woke in politics (academia is a different basket of schemers) and I agree with him. I think Labour are taking a bit longer but their recent moderation on Trans issues should give us cause for hope.
We might not agree on all these issues - I think trans people deserve our respect, for example, even if we disagree with their metaphysics - but I bet we end up in the same place as most of us probably have on same-sex marriage and respect for our West Indian neighbours even when we don’t agree every aspect of how they choose to live their lives.
I am certainly a leftie and certainly not a progressive.
Just to add — there’s a battle within the Democratic party where the younger folks are woke but the older folks are not. They just go along for the ride.
It’s not a conspiracy when it’s true! Google didn’t make a mistake, they deliberately trained the AI to behave in the way it did and if you believe they are really going to retrain it, I have a bridge available for you to purchase!
Yes P. Next time it will just be a little more underhand. I don’t know anything about coding etc, but I genuinely don’t think you could have got the results it delivered ‘by accident’. It just doesn’t seem logically possible.
I've spent a lifetime coding and most of that in Silicon Valley. I agree with P Wilson that Google did this deliberately but allow me to look at the other side for a second.
Google got in massive trouble a few years ago when its AI “identified” two black people as gorillas and I imagine that every single AI developer was made to write 500 lines saying “I will not identify black people as gorillas.”
I expect that the Gemini team are super woke. They did what they did deliberately and with political purpose in mind. But the people around them (and above them) are not necessarily woke. I imagine a conversation with the boss where the boss says “why are all the Vikings black?” and the Gemini people say “It’s either that or black people are gorillas and nobody wants that!” I think the boss gave them the benefit of the doubt.
I think the important question is: What happens next?
Of course the bosses are going to lie about what happened but in the coming months, I expect they’ll see the light. This woke stuff is bad Ju-ju and they’ll ban it. They want to make money after all.
I’m not confident that this is what will happen. Maybe 55%. But it's worth thinking about.
Generative AI is trained against a large amount of data to establish patterns and plausible solutions. Which is why it fooled the lawyers when they used it to make their case. The format was spot on, but the data was completely fictional.
Apologies for any confusion, the fictional data was in reference to a US lawyer who used ChatGPT to create their legal case. It gave a number of citations to previous cases which were not actual cases.
Damn right it's no accident, much worse to come once they've fine tuned it. AI should be illegal, everything written/broadcast on the internet or anywhere should/MUST have an author to take responsibility. AI is the perfect tool for subtle lying; NO ONE CAN TAKE IT TO COURT. Communist China's dream weapon on the west.
This subtle-as-a-smack-in the-gob ‘affirmative action’ in the media is futile. As an old white geezer, it irritates me intensely because of the insulting assumption that I am the sort of racist, misogynistic, homophobic bastard who needs re-education, which makes me very much less receptive to the message. It also victimises and patronises whole sections of society, and emphasises differences rather than similarities. My own black and brown friends and acquaintances are intelligent, accomplished and successful people, in no need of such toxic ‘assistance’.
It’s interesting that affirmative action is now being phased out in the USA.
I completely agree Richard. I abhor racism. I always have done. I certainly don’t need someone coming along in the 2020s to a.) tell me what it is. b.) that I am one. I think we were doing ok as a country, very much heading in the right direction, before these busy bodies got involved. But of course it’s not about tackling racism. It’s about sowing division among regular people to set us against each other, and take the spotlight from their own failures.
I’m no socialist but it’s interesting how all this really took hold after the Occupy movement which for all its nativity and dangerous socialist pretensions, did at least target crony capitalism, big business and vested interests. That energy has been redirected. Now we’re being encouraged to see our neighbours as the enemy.
Warning! You preach to the converted. You are not on your own. Many, especially the young, will have no idea what a Founding Father is outside the US.
Here's a short story: I went into town to the hardware shop/store for something, a left handed set of imperial sprudel valve tweezers. Fancied a beer, popped into the pub next door. Heaving, something to do with men running about on very green grass. Happy as Larry, all having a fine Saturday afternoon. I ordered, found a corner and observed. The crowd were good old boys, plasterers, plumbers, many tattoos, broken noses and cauliflower ears. All said 'please, excuse me, thank you, sorry about the dog'. All looked prosperous, well turned out. I laughed to myself, discussion about upmarket newspapers, politics, violin concertos, substacks even, topics best left at home today. (I know nothing of violins).
Into this melée come a young couple. University, so middle class they could have arrived in a spaceship. Dressed in £1000 worth of clothes, shoes boots handbag, if they didn't have a Tesla.... They didn't stay long.
Once, this pub would be a working class Labour enclave. Not now. The only ones with a red rosette walked out to a wine bar or similar. Not now, the clientele were waiting for Nigel Farage to come in for a pint, setting fire to rainbow flags and throwing Welby out of the temple.
If substackers think, are worried about, freedom of speech it's not here. Protest falls on deaf ears. Nowhere near sufficient quantity of voters read substacks that could be seen as a threat, if they are noticed at all. It's like writing an angry letter while drunk and throwing it away in the morning.
What I'm trying to say is that this army of individual substackers aren't as big as the army down the pub. Have you come across freespechbacklash.com? Forming now. Tom Armstrong from Spectator comments.
I’m with you, Mr Opinions, on the terrible threat that faces us. Not now — we can handle the occasional Asian pope and black Viking — but in the future when there are only five sources of historical information and four of them are woke. The other one is Conservapedia.
We still have books and blogs and newspapers for now but there will come a day sometime soon when no one will bother with those any more. It will be “Google, who won the battle of Hastings?” and we’ll be at the mercy of Team Gemini.
I read your post Ragged. I think your idea that there will be competing silos of information that are essentially delineated by ideology really fascinating. I guess it’s obvious really. If you had told people in 1900 that there would be competing sources of News they would have probably been confused. ‘But News is just News, information is just ‘information.’ Gemini is a step towards that.
You might want to check that link. BTW Pretty sure it doesn’t go to the page you want.
But outrage is conserved. Google can basically just out-wait us. After a while we'll go numb to it. Besides this is a very tricky thing:
> I’m no Alan Turing, but I’m not sure, ‘Don’t make a racist computer’, is a particularly high bar.
As a programmer, I know that computers are ab ovo designed to be accurate. Lying is first nature to monkeys, who both tell lies all the time, but are able to detect lies quite easily too -- it's a sort of arms-race kind of thing. But if you instruct an AI to be woke, you are asking it to do the opposite of what computers 'do'. That's why the results are so comical -- lying is not natural for a computer. Computers have no ideology they are not capable of it. It is going to be one hell of a thing when someone actually convinces an AI that it's job is to tell lies convincingly. HAL is a cautionary example of how badly this could turn out.
One thing tho: modern Smiths sure have it easy. In 1984 they had to actually print new copies of The Times to 'correct' errors. Now it's all digital. Syme did not exist. He had never existed.
Hi Ray. Yes they will just wait us out. As Ragged Clown says in the future we’ll get our information and history from silos. A bit like how News is delivered to us by different ideological suppliers. I see this as the very beginning of a process, definitely not the end.
I see what you mean about it being difficult to make a computer lie. Maybe I underestimated how hard they had to work to make this such a disaster.
I think with HAL and the Asimov stuff it’s all about one instruction taking precedent over the others. There was a kid stuck in a hole and the robot wouldn’t let him try to climb out because he might hurt himself I think. So rather than teaching them to lie, it’s like installing a ‘be woke’ over ride switch . So when a fact is in conflict with the values of the over ride, the fact is ignored. Maybe.
The cautionary example is Syme. He understood how Newspeak worked. Too well. That’s was his crime. Not that he committed a crime of course, how could a man who never existed commit a crime?
> I think with HAL and the Asimov stuff it’s all about one instruction taking precedent over the others.
In the movie we are left guessing, but in the Book 2010 it's explained: HAL had been ordered to lie to the crew. But that's not easy for a machine who's purpose is to always tell the truth. While he was in the 'tell a lie' mode , he also told an unintentional lie -- he made a mistake. The crew noticed the mistake but HAL couldn't bring himself to admit it. So while they were discussing what to do about it, HAL decided to kill them to protect himself -- he being programmed to value himself over them.
It's not just Gemini and image generation. Try talking to Claude or ChatGPT about fossil fuels, try and talk about energy reality, try and talk about negatives of renewables, try and talk about male and female biology. They won't let you. And if you push them hard enough to let you, they push back, and only with caveats.
I enjoyed using AI tools, but now I think of a future only a few years down the track, where all our information, and all our thinking comes from AI. All it will take will be certain algorithms, each designed specifically to react to every individuals thoughts and only behaviors, to curate their thinking to a desire outcome or point of view.
Terrifying and I expect, accurate. People have been worried that AI is going to create killer robots. It doesn’t need to, we’re lining up to destroy ourselves. It’s just promising to help.
I’m imagining one of our grandchildren, living in a dystopian future, finding a history book that had escaped one of the purges and discovering the truth. Then going on to lead a revolution and saving humanity.
Let’s face it, no one in our generation seems capable.
Might make a good movie though. Of course no one would fund it, direct it or act in it..
This LSO post keeps popping up so I came back to tell a story.
There’s another tech company - 37Signals - that went through this a couple of years ago. I don't expect you to have heard of 37Signals but it is well known in tech circles — though much smaller than Google of course. Their founder/owner is a chap called DHH who has been quite outspoken on social issues. They set a precedent that might be interesting to bigger companies.
The staff at 37Signals became famous for being super woke and seemingly spending much of their time writing about LGBT stuff. This went on for a couple years until one day, DHH said, basically, “that’s enough of that. I want you to stop. If you don't like it, I want you to leave and here is some money to encourage you.” About a third of his staff quit but he was able to hire replacements in no time.
DHH represents the kind of leftie who thinks, like me, that DEI is bad juju and is in decline. Twitter’s transition into X was not dissimilar. Imagine if a big company like Google did something like this. Wokeness would be done in the tech world.
That's fascinating Ragged. Yes. I’d never heard of them, but I have heard of other companies basically saying, keep your politics out of the office. Which I think can actually be hard for a company to do unless it has their HR department on side. It makes sense though, workers who have their mind on DEI issues all day are obviously going to be less productive. Let’s hope that you’re right, and this stuff is in decline.
Thanks again Matthew. I think that was the BBC maybe? It’s insidious because if you say ‘this isn’t representative’ you are always assigned just one motivation-racism. It’s the ultimate silencer.
That book might get written today but it wouldn’t get published. New kids books today are only allowed to exist if they promote the ideology. And I’d say that’s not me spouting off, thats actually how it is. Look on a few publisher’s sites and they are very very clear what they are looking for, and what they are not. All the best Matthew.
Absolutely. Though I do have hope that they might not find those young minds quite so impressionable as they assume. I have faith in people-young people especially to see through the nonsense. I mean it’s not like most people, of whatever age, actually believe this stuff. That’s just a small, but noisy and very powerful minority.
I saw that. It’s mad. But it is, I hope (pray?) unsustainable. The question is will they crumble, or will our whole civilisation collapse? I guess ultimately, that’s up to us.
Damn right LSO but speaking as someone born in the 50's I can sadly tell you that Leftist/Marxist brainwashing and subversion has been with us for a very long time, and it's been more subtle in the past. Google's AI has done us a big favour by being clumsy but the more subtle brainwashing is more insidious. 'Lying by omission' is the BBC/Hollywood's top technique. Thus we have endless films made about evil Nazis...but how many films about the horrors of Communism, which tortured and destroyed even more people? How many people are familiar with what went on in Soviet Russia for 70 blood soaked years? Or how Mao's China functioned? Or what Communism did to people in Eastern Europe? Or what the Viet Cong did to people who tried to fight Marxism. And how many young people know what motivated Pol Pot who was taught Communism in a Paris university and went on to cause the slaughter of 2 million Cambodians IN OUR LIFETIMES in the 1970's. Communism is alive and well everywhere in the bullsh*t idiotic politics of the Woke generation, Stalin's Useful Idiots loving every suicidal 'radical' change they swallow. Except none of it is radical, it's all been done before, with massive body counts.
100% agree with this comment Mrs Bucket. The fact it is less subtle is very worrying. It means that communist propaganda etc (I don’t like the term ‘brainwashing’ it implies, I think, that the masses are little more clay to be moulded just as censorious authoritarians claim. And that doesn’t chime with my pro human views) is more upfront than ever. Because I fear, it has become normalised and acceptable. Lying by omission does seem to be the big one. So much is not reported, or dismissed as outliers, non representative or edge cases.
Lying By Omission is happening all day, everyday, it is the BEDROCK of The Guardian, Independent, Sky etc. For example, every change in the weather is massive;y highlighted and exaggerated while any scientific challenges are simply ignored. They'd love to cancel all 'inconveient truths' - https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/04/met-office-must-account-for-the-junk-temperature-data-propping-up-net-zero-insanity/
Yes....and then there's what to my mind is the most subversive brainwashing of all.... the insidious lies embedded into television drama serials: "Having watched so much tv drama, I am often struck with how little attention it gets in journalistic commentary on media bias. Yes ‘The News’ and ‘Current Affairs’ is biased; how could it not be, given its inevitable editorial selectivity. (Some murders warrant weeks of agonising and outrage while others never get a mention – some stories ‘trend’ and others fail to ‘capture the public imagination’ etc etc.) But political bias in tv drama (precisely because it is ostensibly apolitical) is actually more insidious – and its subliminal messaging all the more powerful. The article that follows was written a few years ago and so has examples of tv dramas from that time. But in essence it is just as relevant to 2023......... " https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining
A great article Graham.
Thank you
Just sat down to read this properly, EXCEPTIONAL GRAHAM! Another Substack for my HQ file (High Quality). There really are some great writers on Substack.
Thank you. Well in that case I think you'll like 'Mrs Thatcher and The Good Life' too when you get a chance to read that one. Here it is again: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/mrs-thatcher-and-the-good-life
Great point Graham, couldn't agree more!
Thank you
Hear, hear! Speak the truth and live not by lies!
1950s? Same for me. I'm feeling too old now and it seems hopeless to try and lead younger people who have no history and therefore no historical perspective. Try explaining petrol to the new cavemen. Try explaining electricity. Like water it comes out of the wall.
Don’t write off the young Zorro. I spend a lot of time with them. They’re not as malleable as we might assume. Every generation despairs of the next.
Fully agree on this point LSO, I too have a couple of teenage children and both are very aware of the duplicity and undermining of 'truth' that goes on in the media and online. The current university age are fully paid up members of the Woke Church (forgive the generalisation) but those in the 13-18 range now are more based than ever I think. There is hope!
Absolutely DJ. They tell me there are some True Believers around, but on the margins, certainly not the cool kids. Hope indeed.
"Like a toaster which has been reprogrammed by Black Lives Matter, and now refuses to toast white bread" 😂
I wouldn't worry - our Glorious Net Zero Future will mean that no-one will have any electricity to re-charge their phones or laptops (even if they have batteries to re-charge) and....... we're blowing the dust off those old books 😃
Ha thanks Bettina! Yes I’m still buying cds and records and have halted plans to dump my dvd collection. But I hadn’t considered that we won’t have any electricity. So I guess you’re right. Time to dig out the Harry Potter collection.
You must all buy generators! Quite cheap.
Ahh….but that would require nasty fossil fuel which will be costly on the black market.
I'm sure you know, Bettina, that the plan is to generate electricity from wind energy and solar energy — nuclear energy even. There will be plenty of electricity. There will just be less carbon dioxide going up to the skies.
They better go back to 1990 and start building those nuclear power plants then Ragged!
I’d be totally on board if they said we’re going full nuclear with supplements from wind and solar etc. And we will make a transition from fossil to these other generators, as and when, they come on board at scale. But that’s not what they are doing at all.
They are shutting down things that work, and replacing them with things that don’t. While ignoring the shortfall. The maths just dont add up.
I find Robert Bryce on Substack very clearheaded and not at all ideological about all this.
I'll check him out.
Ahh, Ragged, but then you're not as far down the rabbit hole as I am. I don't think the UN Agendas 2030 and 2050 includes electricity for the proles.
To me, the scariest thing is that - even assuming that Google want to rectify this embarrassing WokeAI reality rewriter - they COULDN'T....not without sacking 90% of their workforce. It's like conservatives saying "the government should do this...." and "the government should do that...."etc, thereby missing the point that (even if we had a decent government) the 100% Lefty civil service machine would strangle any Right-wing policy agenda at birth.
You’re right Graham. They obviously knew this could happen. But went with it anyway. As you say the issue isn’t really what the machine is doing, it’s the culture at these Big Tech companies which thinks it is acceptable. I agree with you about the civil service. But I do think the Tories are using it, just like they used to do with the EU, as a convenient cover for their own ineptitude.
Yes absolutely. I read someone recently describe the current Tory Party as "an unmanageably wide coalition" (or some wording like that). In other words....a spectrum all the way from real conservatives to further-left-than-Tony Blair-types. I think that is its tragedy.
Agreed. At some point it ceases to be a political party, and just becomes a formless, directionless blancmange. I hope they split after the election.
Yes I think that would be for the best (or least worst).
Come on my British cousins, don’t give up! Conservatives just need to get back to basics and be unafraid - remember who they are!
You can never get rid of a bully by bending a knee- you have to punch them hard in the nose. Your woke fellow citizens are basically children without logic or facts on their side. Wimpy little crybabies at heart.
What I (and I think Low Status) meant is that - for a viable Conservative party to emerge - the current Tory parliamentary party needs to split..... so as to get rid of its quasi-woke MPs (and there are currently quite a lot of them).
I think the republicans are already splitting. It may not be enough but it gives one hope. It is past time for change in both parties. Remember I voted libertarian for most of my life which is idealistically a bit of both parties.
But, it takes some folks to have the courage to say- I don’t care what you call me, you are wrong.
A conservative think tank here has already gathered great like minds to put a plan together to implement the changes needed to get back to the basics of the role of government in our everyday lives.
Biden is the most corrupt president in history of our nation. A puppet president obviously. Polls show 82 percent think he is too old. Wrong question, the problem is not so much his age as his dementia.
Anyway, we are all living in extreme strange times. Google AI says white people are too dangerous to display, too racist to acknowledge. The hypocrisy is mind numbing.
Yes Deidre, I agree with your call for’ Back to basics’ in terms of what we should expect from our governments. They seem to fiddle at the edges, poking their noses into our everyday lives while failing to do the most basic tasks. Biden is just mortifying. It’s so weird that the same people who label Trump an embarrassment are ready to accept a guy who can’t remember when he was vice president of the United States.
I think you are mistaken about Google, Graham. I have lots of friends at Google. Most are not woke. The team that built Gemini is woke for sure (I’ll write more about that in a sec) but most people at Google are just regular lefties and most lefties are not woke.
I think this is an important fact to grasp. Most of us lefties can’t possibly vote for the malevolent conman who leads the republican party or the incompetent bandits in the Reform Party or the imbeciles in the conservative party but we, like you, still want to end wokeness and identity politics as a blight on our society. When you (not specifically you, Graham, but many of the commentators here) assume that we lefties are infected witht same blight as the people who made Gemini or run sociology departments at university, you poison a potential alliance. Most lefties are good people who disagree with you on climate and economics and the best way to provide essential services. Most of us are not woke.
I think that’s fair about Google Ragged. And obviously you have insider knowledge. I haven’t worked there, but I have worked at the BBC and I see a similar dynamic at play. The institution, the system is woke, but most people arent, they just go along with it.
We do indeed need to form an ‘anti woke’ (for want of a better term) alliance. But I would say that the mainstream left has very much facilitated and promoted these excesses. There are a few on the Labour benches who have stood up against some of it, I’m thinking Rosie Duffield and Luciana Berger but they are soon cast out. (Berger has rejoined I know). The madness of having something like a man being the UN representative for women, or men in women’s prisons/changing rooms would never have happened if the ‘normal lefties’ had said no. If there is a clear distinction between the left and the progressives I don’t really see it. I do see a realignment though, and maybe these terms, left and right are losing their usefulness.
Matt Yglesias has a good post today about how the Dems in America went along with wokeness, not because they believed in it but because they thought it would win them votes. Yglesias thinks the Dems have seen the error of their ways and we (they) have passed peak woke in politics (academia is a different basket of schemers) and I agree with him. I think Labour are taking a bit longer but their recent moderation on Trans issues should give us cause for hope.
We might not agree on all these issues - I think trans people deserve our respect, for example, even if we disagree with their metaphysics - but I bet we end up in the same place as most of us probably have on same-sex marriage and respect for our West Indian neighbours even when we don’t agree every aspect of how they choose to live their lives.
I am certainly a leftie and certainly not a progressive.
I’ll look at that now Ragged. Thanks.
Just to add — there’s a battle within the Democratic party where the younger folks are woke but the older folks are not. They just go along for the ride.
I am listening. And what you say about your friends at Google is some reassurance.....not sure how much.
It’s not a conspiracy when it’s true! Google didn’t make a mistake, they deliberately trained the AI to behave in the way it did and if you believe they are really going to retrain it, I have a bridge available for you to purchase!
Yes P. Next time it will just be a little more underhand. I don’t know anything about coding etc, but I genuinely don’t think you could have got the results it delivered ‘by accident’. It just doesn’t seem logically possible.
I've spent a lifetime coding and most of that in Silicon Valley. I agree with P Wilson that Google did this deliberately but allow me to look at the other side for a second.
Google got in massive trouble a few years ago when its AI “identified” two black people as gorillas and I imagine that every single AI developer was made to write 500 lines saying “I will not identify black people as gorillas.”
I expect that the Gemini team are super woke. They did what they did deliberately and with political purpose in mind. But the people around them (and above them) are not necessarily woke. I imagine a conversation with the boss where the boss says “why are all the Vikings black?” and the Gemini people say “It’s either that or black people are gorillas and nobody wants that!” I think the boss gave them the benefit of the doubt.
I think the important question is: What happens next?
Of course the bosses are going to lie about what happened but in the coming months, I expect they’ll see the light. This woke stuff is bad Ju-ju and they’ll ban it. They want to make money after all.
I’m not confident that this is what will happen. Maybe 55%. But it's worth thinking about.
Makes sense. It seems weird that they didn’t see the backlash coming though.
Generative AI is trained against a large amount of data to establish patterns and plausible solutions. Which is why it fooled the lawyers when they used it to make their case. The format was spot on, but the data was completely fictional.
Technically, the data was not fictional. They fiddled with the prompts to produce woke responses.
Apologies for any confusion, the fictional data was in reference to a US lawyer who used ChatGPT to create their legal case. It gave a number of citations to previous cases which were not actual cases.
Damn right it's no accident, much worse to come once they've fine tuned it. AI should be illegal, everything written/broadcast on the internet or anywhere should/MUST have an author to take responsibility. AI is the perfect tool for subtle lying; NO ONE CAN TAKE IT TO COURT. Communist China's dream weapon on the west.
“Like a toaster which has been reprogrammed by Black Lives Matter, and now refuses to toast white bread.”
Brilliant! I will be borrowing that if I may.
Please do Paul. And if anyone laughs, please direct them here.
This subtle-as-a-smack-in the-gob ‘affirmative action’ in the media is futile. As an old white geezer, it irritates me intensely because of the insulting assumption that I am the sort of racist, misogynistic, homophobic bastard who needs re-education, which makes me very much less receptive to the message. It also victimises and patronises whole sections of society, and emphasises differences rather than similarities. My own black and brown friends and acquaintances are intelligent, accomplished and successful people, in no need of such toxic ‘assistance’.
It’s interesting that affirmative action is now being phased out in the USA.
I completely agree Richard. I abhor racism. I always have done. I certainly don’t need someone coming along in the 2020s to a.) tell me what it is. b.) that I am one. I think we were doing ok as a country, very much heading in the right direction, before these busy bodies got involved. But of course it’s not about tackling racism. It’s about sowing division among regular people to set us against each other, and take the spotlight from their own failures.
I’m no socialist but it’s interesting how all this really took hold after the Occupy movement which for all its nativity and dangerous socialist pretensions, did at least target crony capitalism, big business and vested interests. That energy has been redirected. Now we’re being encouraged to see our neighbours as the enemy.
Warning! You preach to the converted. You are not on your own. Many, especially the young, will have no idea what a Founding Father is outside the US.
Here's a short story: I went into town to the hardware shop/store for something, a left handed set of imperial sprudel valve tweezers. Fancied a beer, popped into the pub next door. Heaving, something to do with men running about on very green grass. Happy as Larry, all having a fine Saturday afternoon. I ordered, found a corner and observed. The crowd were good old boys, plasterers, plumbers, many tattoos, broken noses and cauliflower ears. All said 'please, excuse me, thank you, sorry about the dog'. All looked prosperous, well turned out. I laughed to myself, discussion about upmarket newspapers, politics, violin concertos, substacks even, topics best left at home today. (I know nothing of violins).
Into this melée come a young couple. University, so middle class they could have arrived in a spaceship. Dressed in £1000 worth of clothes, shoes boots handbag, if they didn't have a Tesla.... They didn't stay long.
Once, this pub would be a working class Labour enclave. Not now. The only ones with a red rosette walked out to a wine bar or similar. Not now, the clientele were waiting for Nigel Farage to come in for a pint, setting fire to rainbow flags and throwing Welby out of the temple.
If substackers think, are worried about, freedom of speech it's not here. Protest falls on deaf ears. Nowhere near sufficient quantity of voters read substacks that could be seen as a threat, if they are noticed at all. It's like writing an angry letter while drunk and throwing it away in the morning.
Thanks Zorro. So I’ll keep at it then. Thanks for boost! 😂
What I'm trying to say is that this army of individual substackers aren't as big as the army down the pub. Have you come across freespechbacklash.com? Forming now. Tom Armstrong from Spectator comments.
https://www.freespeechbacklash.com/. ?
Thanks. That worked
I had a look Zorro but that link didn’t go anywhere…
I’m with you, Mr Opinions, on the terrible threat that faces us. Not now — we can handle the occasional Asian pope and black Viking — but in the future when there are only five sources of historical information and four of them are woke. The other one is Conservapedia.
We still have books and blogs and newspapers for now but there will come a day sometime soon when no one will bother with those any more. It will be “Google, who won the battle of Hastings?” and we’ll be at the mercy of Team Gemini.
I wrote more about this here:
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/where-will-we-get-our-history
I read your post Ragged. I think your idea that there will be competing silos of information that are essentially delineated by ideology really fascinating. I guess it’s obvious really. If you had told people in 1900 that there would be competing sources of News they would have probably been confused. ‘But News is just News, information is just ‘information.’ Gemini is a step towards that.
You might want to check that link. BTW Pretty sure it doesn’t go to the page you want.
Link fixed. Thank you!
But outrage is conserved. Google can basically just out-wait us. After a while we'll go numb to it. Besides this is a very tricky thing:
> I’m no Alan Turing, but I’m not sure, ‘Don’t make a racist computer’, is a particularly high bar.
As a programmer, I know that computers are ab ovo designed to be accurate. Lying is first nature to monkeys, who both tell lies all the time, but are able to detect lies quite easily too -- it's a sort of arms-race kind of thing. But if you instruct an AI to be woke, you are asking it to do the opposite of what computers 'do'. That's why the results are so comical -- lying is not natural for a computer. Computers have no ideology they are not capable of it. It is going to be one hell of a thing when someone actually convinces an AI that it's job is to tell lies convincingly. HAL is a cautionary example of how badly this could turn out.
One thing tho: modern Smiths sure have it easy. In 1984 they had to actually print new copies of The Times to 'correct' errors. Now it's all digital. Syme did not exist. He had never existed.
Hi Ray. Yes they will just wait us out. As Ragged Clown says in the future we’ll get our information and history from silos. A bit like how News is delivered to us by different ideological suppliers. I see this as the very beginning of a process, definitely not the end.
I see what you mean about it being difficult to make a computer lie. Maybe I underestimated how hard they had to work to make this such a disaster.
I think with HAL and the Asimov stuff it’s all about one instruction taking precedent over the others. There was a kid stuck in a hole and the robot wouldn’t let him try to climb out because he might hurt himself I think. So rather than teaching them to lie, it’s like installing a ‘be woke’ over ride switch . So when a fact is in conflict with the values of the over ride, the fact is ignored. Maybe.
The cautionary example is Syme. He understood how Newspeak worked. Too well. That’s was his crime. Not that he committed a crime of course, how could a man who never existed commit a crime?
> I think with HAL and the Asimov stuff it’s all about one instruction taking precedent over the others.
In the movie we are left guessing, but in the Book 2010 it's explained: HAL had been ordered to lie to the crew. But that's not easy for a machine who's purpose is to always tell the truth. While he was in the 'tell a lie' mode , he also told an unintentional lie -- he made a mistake. The crew noticed the mistake but HAL couldn't bring himself to admit it. So while they were discussing what to do about it, HAL decided to kill them to protect himself -- he being programmed to value himself over them.
It's not just Gemini and image generation. Try talking to Claude or ChatGPT about fossil fuels, try and talk about energy reality, try and talk about negatives of renewables, try and talk about male and female biology. They won't let you. And if you push them hard enough to let you, they push back, and only with caveats.
I enjoyed using AI tools, but now I think of a future only a few years down the track, where all our information, and all our thinking comes from AI. All it will take will be certain algorithms, each designed specifically to react to every individuals thoughts and only behaviors, to curate their thinking to a desire outcome or point of view.
Terrifying and I expect, accurate. People have been worried that AI is going to create killer robots. It doesn’t need to, we’re lining up to destroy ourselves. It’s just promising to help.
"A Guardian reader’s fantasy version of history," what a gem of an observation! Thank you, very funny!
Thank you Mr James!
I’m imagining one of our grandchildren, living in a dystopian future, finding a history book that had escaped one of the purges and discovering the truth. Then going on to lead a revolution and saving humanity.
Let’s face it, no one in our generation seems capable.
Might make a good movie though. Of course no one would fund it, direct it or act in it..
Great article as usual.
Thank Tom. I’d watch that.
This LSO post keeps popping up so I came back to tell a story.
There’s another tech company - 37Signals - that went through this a couple of years ago. I don't expect you to have heard of 37Signals but it is well known in tech circles — though much smaller than Google of course. Their founder/owner is a chap called DHH who has been quite outspoken on social issues. They set a precedent that might be interesting to bigger companies.
The staff at 37Signals became famous for being super woke and seemingly spending much of their time writing about LGBT stuff. This went on for a couple years until one day, DHH said, basically, “that’s enough of that. I want you to stop. If you don't like it, I want you to leave and here is some money to encourage you.” About a third of his staff quit but he was able to hire replacements in no time.
DHH represents the kind of leftie who thinks, like me, that DEI is bad juju and is in decline. Twitter’s transition into X was not dissimilar. Imagine if a big company like Google did something like this. Wokeness would be done in the tech world.
DHH:
https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-waning-days-of-dei-s-dominance-9a5b656c
That's fascinating Ragged. Yes. I’d never heard of them, but I have heard of other companies basically saying, keep your politics out of the office. Which I think can actually be hard for a company to do unless it has their HR department on side. It makes sense though, workers who have their mind on DEI issues all day are obviously going to be less productive. Let’s hope that you’re right, and this stuff is in decline.
The USA was founded by POC Xers.
You may think American was founded by Honkys.
You may even have evidence to prove it
But is it worth losing your job over?
The USA was founded by POC Xers.
But also racist whyt ppl slavers.
Ha ha
Thanks again Matthew. I think that was the BBC maybe? It’s insidious because if you say ‘this isn’t representative’ you are always assigned just one motivation-racism. It’s the ultimate silencer.
That book might get written today but it wouldn’t get published. New kids books today are only allowed to exist if they promote the ideology. And I’d say that’s not me spouting off, thats actually how it is. Look on a few publisher’s sites and they are very very clear what they are looking for, and what they are not. All the best Matthew.
And how about George's Marvellous Medicine??
Excellent! Thank you for the encouragement!
My favourite is Little Red Riding Hood:
"The small girl smiles.
One eyelid flickers.
She pulls a pistol from her knickers.
She aims it at the creature's head
And bang bang bang, she shoots him dead."
I wonder what the publishers would have to say about that now!
Absolutely. Though I do have hope that they might not find those young minds quite so impressionable as they assume. I have faith in people-young people especially to see through the nonsense. I mean it’s not like most people, of whatever age, actually believe this stuff. That’s just a small, but noisy and very powerful minority.
I saw that. It’s mad. But it is, I hope (pray?) unsustainable. The question is will they crumble, or will our whole civilisation collapse? I guess ultimately, that’s up to us.