I can’t remember exactly what day I quit using Google, but I do know that somewhere back in 2008-2010 I was using different search full-time.
It’s well known that Google’s search results reflect the personal opinions of Google and it’s employees; it doesn’t necessarily show facts, science, or objective results, and it’s been this way since the early 00’s.
When I learned of Google’s latest racism gaff I wasn’t surprised:
Google says it has temporarily suspended the ability of Gemini, its flagship generative AI suite of models, to generate images of people while it works on updating the “technology” (code for toning down the DEI) to improve the historical accuracy of outputs involving depictions of humans.
Gemini … When prompted to show images of a Black person, the AI offers to show images that “celebrate the diversity and achievement of Black people.”
I guess that when the Gemini AI was asked to show a picture of a White person, it said it could not fulfill the request because it “reinforces harmful stereotypes and generalizations about people based on their race.”
After multiple tests White people appeared to be the only racial category that Gemini refused to show.
The primary take-away here is that Google has a racism problem, or rather Google’s engineers have a racism problem.
The problem isn’t a new one because as you see, an earlier AI image classification tool made by Google caused outrage, back in 2015, when it misclassified black men as gorillas. The company promised to fix the issue but, as Wired reported a few years later, its ‘fix’ was a pure workaround: With Google simply blocking the tech from recognizing gorillas at all.
As long as there are humans writing the code and doing the math, going forward, our so-called artificial intelligence will still continue to be artificial, but will have nothing to do with intelligence.
There’s nothing at all intelligent about racism.
Paris-based venture capitalist Michael Jackson branded Google’s AI as “a nonsensical DEI parody”.
Bias will always rear it’s ugly head as long as there are programmers or engineers that have an opinion … on anything … because Generative AI tools produce outputs based on training data and other parameters, such as model weights.
Running off the societal rails in this country is nothing new.
DEI is the new Eugenics —
Eugenics was the set of beliefs and practices which aimed to improve the genetic quality of the human population, it played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States from the late 19th century into the mid-20th century. The cause became increasingly promoted by intellectuals of the Progressive Era.
DEI will prove itself to be a failed attempt at improving the quality of the human population, just like Eugenics did back in the day.
History repeats itself because people have forgotten that we already had a Progressive Era.
DEI is just as racist as Eugenics was … and here we have the likes of Google buying into a bill of goods that serves absolutely no good purpose. Any ideology that rejects portions of a population in an attempt to improve on a society are doomed to failure.
It’s not just Google either:
We can even see Microsoft running off the rails:
If you use grammar check on Microsoft word you will encounter even more nonsense.
It flags everything from “‘mankind” to “father and mother”. It doesn’t like the use of brother or sister instead telling you that it’s more inclusive to say sibling.
It doesn’t like terms like waitress or waiter. It’s more inclusive to say server. Things like that. It has an entire check for inclusivity and any term others might find offensive.
Our world is full of brothers and sisters, white people and black people, waiters and waitresses, husbands and wives. These are the things that makes the world go ’round.
Your exclusion of any of these things makes you so much less inclusive than those who include them. Your DEI is totally worthless and a waste of time. It causes much more division and goes to show just how intolerant those who claim to be tolerant are.
You can’t lift someone up by putting someone else down. This is the sort of thing that your average high school bully does. It’s tyranny, it’s abhorrent, and it’s unacceptable … just like Eugenics was.
I didn’t quit Google because it was racist, I quit Google because I got tired of it telling me what I liked or not. I got tired of Google showing me things that it wanted me to see, and not the things that I actually wanted to see. I quit Google because it was a worthless search for any kind of genuine science or research. I’m thinking that maybe someone should let Google in on the fact that Pseudoscience is not science.
Looking back, I’m glad I quit Google when I did, because Google has never gotten better … only worse (I had no idea of just how racist Google would become).
As the case is with Google today and it’s blatant racism, and not too unlike how Eugenics was back in the day, developing and maintaining derogatory social constructs will do nothing to advance society as a whole. As a society, we didn’t learn the lesson of Eugenics, so now we have to go back and take the class again.
Lets just hope that this time we won’t fail the class, because if we do, we’ll be going down this same path 100 years from now.
sourced:
Fox Business – Wikipedia
Eugenics
Gilded Age
Wired
