01. March 2024 · Comments Off on Visual Disaster · Categories: Ain't That America?, Geekery, Media Matters Not

I admit to being alternately horrified and amused at Google’s Gemini AI visual disaster. Usually, a pratfall of this magnitude involves a bakery-worth of thrown cream pies. Frankly, I am relishing the spectacle of a publicity disaster this epic; a fail so huge as to be practically visible from outer space. We mere mortals are not often given the privilege of watching our so-called betters sequentially step on a yard full of cosmic rakes. Just desserts, just main course, a whole hors d’oeuvres of crow!

Everyone to the right of the harridans of The View pretty much had gathered over the last few years that Google as a search engine had bias in favor of the progressive flavor o’the month and against anything with the slightest tinge of conservative, traditionalist, skeptical leanings. But what a gift it was to have it demonstrated so openly and undeniably. I don’t know which was more risible and ridiculous – the Vikings as black, the oriental woman trooper in a Nazi Army uniform, or the American founding fathers as black or indigenous – or whatever the current correct term du jour is. How nice to have it proved, once and for all.

Tt couldn’t be more clear, if painted in three-foot tall letters across highway billboards – Google Gemini was absolutely determined to give users not what they wanted and asked for, but what the tweaked and massaged algorithm dictated that clients/requestors ought to get. Shouldn’t really have come as a surprise, after all, because that is that the cultural gatekeepers having been doing for the last decade or more – in traditional publishing, in the news media generally, and in Hollywood producing movies and television shows for public consumption, and other fields. They have been serving up great heaping helpings of what they think we should have; movie franchises with acres of unpleasant and unappealing Mary Sue girl-bosses, and all the rest of the progressive pantheon of race and sex-swapping progressive nominated heroes and designated hapless villains … not what we really want. (Interesting discussion here on that topic of the cultural leaders giving us what they think we should have, rather than what we want.)
Discuss as you wish.

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