E-Pluribus | February 29, 2024
Google: OK, let's be evil after all; Black History Month, conservative style; and censorship via artificial intelligence is all too real.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Nate Silver: Google abandoned "don't be evil" — and Gemini is the result
Nate Silver (of FiveThirtyEight fame) has written a long piece on Google Gemini at his Silver Bulletin Substack. Silver reviews Google’s evolution from a (the best by far at the time) search engine to a much larger and more powerful political and cultural influencer and why that matters, particularly in the age of artificial intelligence.
Gemini grabbed my attention because the overlap between politics, media and AI is a place on the Venn Diagram where think I can add a lot of value. Despite Google’s protestations to the contrary, the reasons for Gemini’s shortcomings are mostly political, not technological. Also, many of the debates about Gemini are familiar territory, because they parallel decades-old debates in journalism. Should journalists strive to promote the common good or instead just reveal the world for what it is? Where is the line between information and advocacy? Is it even possible or desirable to be unbiased — and if so, how does one go about accomplishing that?2 How should consumers navigate a world rife with misinformation — when sometimes the misinformation is published by the most authoritative sources? How are the answers affected by the increasing consolidation of the industry toward a few big winners — and by increasing political polarization in the US and other industrialized democracies?
[. . .]
[In] its 2004 IPO filing, Google said that its “mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. That’s quite an ambitious undertaking, obviously. It wants to be the authoritative source, not just one of many. And that shows up in the numbers: Google has a near-monopoly with around 90 percent of global search traffic. AI models, because they require so much computing power, are also likely to be extremely top-heavy, with at most a few big players dominating the space.
In its early years, Google recognized its market-leading position by striving for neutrality, however challenging that might be to achieve in practice. In its IPO, Google frequently emphasized terms like “unbiased”, “objective” and “accurate”, and these were core parts of its “Don’t Be Evil” motto. . .
[. . .]
But times have changed. In Google’s 2023 Annual Report, the terms “unbiased”, “objective” and “accurate” did not appear even once. [citation omitted] Nor did the “Don’t Be Evil” motto — it has largely been retired. Google is no longer promising these things — and as Gemini demonstrates, it’s no longer delivering them.
The problems with Gemini aren’t quite the “alignment problems” that AI researchers usually talk about, which concern the extent to which the machines will facilitate human interests rather than pursuing their own goals. Nonetheless, companies and governments exploiting public trust and manipulating AI results to fulfill political objectives is a potentially dystopian scenario in its own right.
[. . .]
Mind you, I don’t think that the only issue with Gemini is with its politics. Rather, there are two core problems:
Gemini’s results are heavily inflected with politics in ways that often render it biased, inaccurate and misinformative;
Gemini was rushed to market months before it was ready.
These are tied together in the sense that the latter problem makes the former one more obvious: Gemini is easy to pick on because what it’s doing is so clumsy and the kinks haven’t been worked out. It’s easy to imagine more insidious and frankly more competent forms of social engineering in the future.
Read the whole thing.
Brian Hawkins: What to the Conservative Is Black History Month?
At City Journal, Brian Hawkins says there’s no reason conservatives have to avoid Black History Month. Hawkins says the triumph of Black Americans over slavery and segregation and other adversity common to all is part of American history that need not be ceded to the left.
Black History Month is understandably fraught for conservatives. As popularly observed, it highlights supposedly enduring discrimination against blacks, and reinforces the progressive narrative that blacks are hopelessly oppressed by the white majority. Given progressives’ stranglehold on the narrative, it’s reasonable to ask whether Black History Month is even worth saving. Many conservatives would likely say no. Any realistic assessment of our present culture would have to conclude, however, that Black History Month isn’t going anywhere. Conservatives, then, have a choice to make: whether to regard Black History Month as inherently left-wing and beyond reform, or to consider whether the observance can be used to recast black history as an essentially American story of triumph over adversity.
Conservatives rightly sense that progressives’ blinkered celebration of Black History Month is intended to undermine the values of liberty, equality, and justice. But by rejecting Black History Month, conservatives risk ceding black history entirely to the Left, at the expense of blacks who historically have bucked liberal pieties. At the National Museum of African American History and Culture, for example, figures such as Justice Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice play secondary roles, while economists Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell are absent. Meantime, curators dedicated an entire exhibit to Trayvon Martin, and featured Anita Hill more prominently than Justice Thomas in the museum’s section on black accomplishments at the U.S. Supreme Court.
[. . .]
[C]onservatives should situate Black History Month as an extension of American history, using anecdotes to illustrate how blacks have overcome injustice and embraced American ideals. The personal stories of Justice Thomas, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice, for example, challenge the Left’s assumptions about black progress in the United States. Thomas is among the greatest U.S. Supreme Court justices in American history, regardless of race; Powell was a decorated military officer and was awarded the Soldiers Medal for heroically saving three servicemembers; Rice was among the foremost experts on Soviet Russia during the Cold War, aiding her ascent to America’s foreign policy elite. Each overcame tremendous odds. Their accomplishments, and those of many similar black figures, are American triumphs.
Read it all here.
Jacob Mchangama & Jules White: The Future of Censorship Is AI-Generated
Just as technology has revolutionized modern life in almost every way imaginable, AI (artificial intelligence), though still in its infancy, is likely to have a dramatic effect in ways that current technology has not, or at least not to the same extent. Writing for Time, Jacob Mchangama & Jules White spell out their concerns that AI might limit or interfere with the very freedoms that AI promises to expand.
How the “guardrails" of GenAI are defined and deployed is likely to have a significant and increasing impact on shaping the ecosystem of information and ideas that most humans engage with. And currently the loudest voices are those that warn about the harms of GenAI, including the mass production of hate speech and credible disinformation. The World Economic Forum has even labeled AI-generated disinformation the most severe global threat here and now.
[. . .]
Most people agree that GenAI should not provide users a blueprint for developing chemical or biological weapons. Nor should AI-systems facilitate the creation of child pornography or non-consensual sexual material, even if fake. However, the most widely available GenAI chatbots like OpenAI´s ChatGPT and Google´s Gemini, prevent much broader and vaguer definitions of “harm” that leave users in the dark about where, how, and why the red lines are drawn. From a business perspective this might be wise given the “techlash” that social media companies have had to navigate since 2016 with the U.S. presidential election, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
But the leading GenAI developers may end up swinging so far in the direction of harm-prevention that they end up undermining the promise and integrity of their revolutionary products. Even worse, the algorithms are already conflicted, inconsistent, and interfere with users' ability to access information.
[. . .]
It is true that much of the content filtered by ChatGPT and Gemini can be found through search engines or platforms like YouTube. But both Microsoft—a major investor in OpenAI—and Google are rapidly integrating GenAI into their other products such as search (Bing and Google search), word processing (Word and Google Docs), and e-mail (Outlook and Gmail). For now, humans can override AI, and both Word and Gmail allow users to write and send content that ChatGPT and Gemini might disapprove of.
But as the integration of GenAI becomes ubiquitous in everyday technology it is not a given that search, word processing, and email will continue to allow humans to be fully in control. The perspectives are frightening. Imagine a world where your word processor prevents you from analyzing, criticizing, lauding, or reporting on a topic deemed “harmful” by an AI programmed to only process ideas that are “respectful and appropriate for all.”
Hopefully such a scenario will never become reality. But the current over implementation of GenAI guardrails may become more pervasive in different and slightly less Orwellian ways. Governments are currently rushing to regulate AI. Regulation is needed to prevent real and concrete harms and safeguard basic human rights. But regulation of social media—such as the EU’s Digital Services Act—suggests that regulators will focus heavily on the potential harms rather than the benefits of new technology. This might create strong incentives for AI companies to keep in place expansive definitions of “harm” that limit human agency.
Read it all.
Around Twitter (X)
The Wall Street Journal’s Dustin Volz reports that the new White House executive order exempts the US government from data restrictions placed on other governments. The ACLU says this is a potential threat to free expression here at home:
Here’s Minnesota State Representative Walter Hudson arguing that transgenderism is deeply threatening to the classical liberal order. (Click for video.)
And finally, here’s the Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression with another sadly necessary reminder that violence is never a legitimate response to free speech. (Click for video via Steve McGuire.)