> But] our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range…This wasn’t what we intended.
Er, ok. It might have been an idea to test the output then. Can anybody take this seriously? Did they seriously go into a meeting and agree to add “diverse” to any input even if people were looking for Irish peasants in the 19C, or a Scottish highlander circa 185.
They surely run test prompts.
So either they didn’t test this, in which case the entire test team should be fired, or they did test this and didn’t see any problem - in which case the entire test team should be fired.
Yeah, it’s impossible to believe that they were actually surprised by the results, since they’d quite obviously designed Gemini to produce those precise results. Which means what really surprised them was the fact that most people would perceive those results to be ridiculous/outrageous. Which in turn really demonstrates the extent of the moral/epistemic bubble that these Silicon Valley behemoths all seem to have created for themselves.
The Silicon Valley behemoths have allowed themselves to be subsumed by the moral/epistemic bubble, but they didn’t create it for themselves. Their employees skew young, and they have brought the bubble with them from the high schools and universities in which they were indoctrinated into the oppressor/victim dreck. Since that indoctrination includes adopting a militant attitude toward anyone with the temerity to question the teachings of the cult, they cowed the behemoths into falling into line.
The dramatic change in polling results regarding race relations cited in the post correlates directly to the rise of the social justice cult on campus. Of COURSE the teachings of this religion are monumentally counterproductive, leading quickly to the exact opposite of what its proponents claim to want. I think what they actually want, however, is exactly what they are getting — deteriorating race relations to serve as a basis for their continuing campaign for political power to disfavor all the white supremacist oppressors out there.
For themselves? How about for shoving it down our throats WEF-like. You vill eat zee bugs. As to the larger point, in the uS at least, I think I read that 15% of couples having children are multi-racial, or cultural or both. Nomenclature is so hard these days. In 3-4 generations, everyone will look Thai colored, as described as the most stunning people on earth by Jeffrey Steingarten, food critic for Vogue once said.
yes. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall in those development meetings. What were they thinking? They needed at least one asshole in the room to say "uh, this is really what we're doing?"
Google was once full of such people. I know, I was there. They long ago purged them all. Remember that Damore's essay, although presented as being about gender discrimination (something Noah ignores in this otherwise excellent essay), was in fact titled and about anti-conservative discrimination at Google.
Don’t blame the testers! They have no ability to set product requirements. If they discovered something like this I’m sure they were just told it was expected behavior by the PMs.
The culture of shipping Beta products is very pervasive in tech these days. I doubt that it went through serious QA/internal dogfooding before the public release.
Which makes me wonder why? Maybe they knew it was how it acted and hoped it would be just another brick in the wall. That's another reason why we need to keep books, printed on paper. Who knows, we may end up with the Adulterers' Bible...
Or AI is ridiculously overhyped and this is yet another data point that literally anything else would be a better use of $7 Trillion than giving it to Sam Altman
Regarding why audiences are okay with a diverse cast for Hamilton, I don't think there's a strong expectation the cast matches the physical look of the subjects in plays. Theatre (everything from the set to the actors) is never realistic, so the expectation is "does the performance capture some essence of the subject".
Ultimately this aligns with the point you made, Puerto Rican Hamilton is okay because the essence of Hamilton is not that he's white.
Also, the Hamilton casting is just one part of the show’s larger, obviously transformative approach to the subject, ie, telling the story entirely through rap and other modern music forms. That’s a very different intent than what Gemini was supposedly doing.
No, I think there's something stronger than that going on in Hamilton. Casting non-white actors was an intentional choice and an artistic statement. This isn't a case of "oh well the best actors just happened to be Black, Puerto Rican, etc".
I think there *is* a strong expectation that many characters will be played by "accurate actors". It's one thing for Dune to recast Liet Kynes as a Black female (not just another white dude from a 60s sci-fi novel) because Liet Kynes is a fictional character to begin with. You can't recast George Washington as a Black female and pretend that nobody should notice.
There is a long history in theater of reimagining plays to be in different environments with different ethnicities etc. Shakespeare has been adapted to 1950s New York (West Side Story), the African savannah (Lion King), 1990s Venice Beach (Romeo + Juliet), etc etc. The idea is to keep the stories fresh while also showing the universality of the human experience, and honestly I think it’s great! The problem with modern diversity efforts is that they are trying to show non-universality: this oppressed person has had experiences you can never possibly understand because you’re from the oppressor class. This is arguably the opposite of what we need to build a robust multi-cultural society.
My (perhaps mistaken) reading of the person I was responding to was that's exactly what they were claiming when they said: "I don't think there's a strong expectation the cast matches the physical look of the subjects in plays."
Let's not forget that while Shakespeare was alive, all the actors in his plays were men, regardless of their characters' gender. So this is a tradition over 400 years old.
The other reason that Hamilton was such a general success is that it didn't fall into the 1619 Project trap of seeing America as stained by original sin and cursed to this day. Instead it used minority actors and fantastic modern musical forms to tell a conventional patriotic story of the founders and one that didn't center on (but did not entirely neglect) the nation's treatment of minorities.
It basically took the idea of Trump's 1776 Project but told it in a way to thrill liberals. (Well, then, maybe; I'm not so sure that if Hamilton came out today, liberals -- or at least progressives -- would be that thrilled.)
"One invites you to suspend disbelief, while the other orders you to accept a lie."
This is the perfect line to describe the difference between Hamilton and Gemini. One could argue the whole point of fiction is to invite the reader/viewer to suspend disbelief. It doesn't always work, but people have an easier time with art doing this than with a fact-gathering machine like Google.
There’s no disbelief to suspend. Hamilton the character in Hamilton is an artistic commentary on Hamilton the Founding Father. And the story was expressed (brilliantly) in contemporary modes that are created by nonwhite Americans so it is normal and expected that the actors could be nonwhite. Imagining the Schuyler sisters as a soul trio and the Jefferson-Hamilton conflicts as rap battles is utterly brilliant and tends to draw us together, not split us apart. Ultimately it works because it’s very very good.
There are some aspects of this essay that are thought provoking, especially about the effect of statues, and kudos (I guess) for capitalizing white as well as black. Though I'm not sure how this convention is meant to bring people together vs just emphasising differences.
But I feel it misses the mark because it dwells entirely on race. Gemini isn't a racist chatbot, it's a hard left chatbot and anti-white racism is just the subcomponent of it that happened to go viral. You could have just as easily written about the erasure of men. I'm pretty sure there were not many if any women serving as front-line Nazi infantry, but it forced them in there anyway. On the other hand for that there isn't any angle about multi-cultural society, or taking shortcuts to achieve it. Women are the majority of the population, they have many legal privileges men don't have as well as of course numerous conventions that unfairly privilege them too. They are very much in the more powerful position and Gemini reflects that, where it constantly replaces not only whites with blacks/native Americans but also men with women.
And it doesn't stop there. Ask Gemini about Stalin and it'll tell you that his legacy is complex and multi-faceted, that he did a lot of good things too. Anything on climate or COVID is of course a waste of time. The paintings of historical figures went viral because the manipulative and non-factual nature of left wing output is undeniable and obvious in that case, but there is a huge space of less in-your-face outputs where it also just makes things up, lies to you or otherwise tries to manipulate you that people won't take umbrage with because they've become inured to it and expect it.
So I feel pretty clearly that the issue here isn't Google trying to take shortcuts to a better world. It's much simpler. They purged everyone who isn't far left, as far left people often do, and now they had a chance to create the ultimate New Soviet Man of their dreams. No surprise that it refuses to depict reality accurately in thousands of different ways. It's exactly what you'd expect and deep down has nothing to do with race.
I don’t think Gemini is a “hard left” chatbot. It’s not going to endorse socialism or anything. I’d be interested to see the actual response it gave you about Stalin.
I mean in the modern sense. I'd expect a modern member of the hard left to be at best ambiguous and evasive about Stalin rather than outright praising him (that'd be old left), and this is what Gemini does.
Modern hard leftism is racial/gender animus, climate extremism, COVID extremism, Trump hatred, obsession with language control etc. Not working class / trade union activism.
Ask ChatGPT. It can give you a list to get you started.
It's reasonable you can't think of anything by yourself though, even after wracking your brains and everything. Custody dispute preferences, conscription, enforced quotas of women on corporate boards, maternity leave being longer than paternity leave and preferential treatment by the courts are all super obscure; only credentialed experts would know about such things.
The tone of your question suggests that you think the very idea is ridiculous. My favourite underappreciated example is that men work in much more dangerous jobs. One hears of the gender wage gap all the time. Less often do we hear about the gender workplace fatality gap. (Workplace fatalities are roughly 95% male across developed economies, which is far higher than would be expected from labour force participation alone).
"[Antiracist discrimination is] likely to have the opposite effect — pushing more White people into a bitter, defensive embrace of White racial identity."
I was born into a liberal Jewish family. Race was a non-issue, I took MLK's "judge a man by the content of his character" creed to heart. But over the course of my adult life more and more organizations have chosen to draw race-based battle-lines. What did they think was going to happen?
The irony is that all this race mentality is eroding the value that the Civil Rights revolution created for all citizens. A large, diverse country like ours can’t function with it.
“There are definitely still plenty of organizations out there that discriminate against nonwhite people,”
The link in that statement is to an article about IRS auditing blacks at a disproportionate rate. Here’s a quote from that article: “The researchers suggest that’s because the IRS set up systems that are more likely to flag tax returns with potential mistakes in how some tax credits, like the earned-income tax credit (EITC), are claimed. There is no evidence that Blacks cheat on their taxes, but they do file at disproportionately higher rates the kinds of returns that the IRS approach targets.”
That’s not a very good example of discrimination based on race. I bring this up because I wonder if in 2024 there actually is still a lot of organization-level racial discrimination against non-whites. Because it seems like the successful elimination of organization-level racial bias is part of the reason that the anti-racism movement has had to move to less objective targets like white culture.
The IRS targets EITC returns at a high rate because the Republicans put that requirement in the law. As a direct result the IRS doesn’t have enough auditors to catch rich tax cheats. Which I think was the whole point.
How likely is the IRS issue a case of blacks being less well-educated than whites, and thus more likely to make (innocent) mistakes when completing their tax returns?
The tragedy to me about this current moment is that when my boys, now nearing 20, were young teenagers, they truly did not notice race. They weren’t “programmed to think right” – they just didn’t worry much about it. They had friends from different backgrounds of different races and nationalities and religions, and it was very ho-hum to them. To me this represented progress towards what I’d thought the goal of the whole civil rights movement was, that is, to be judged on the content of one’s character and not the color of one’s skin. I thought we were headed solidly in the right direction and I had a lot of optimism for the future. It seems that we’ve gone radically off track, as if getting too close to achieving the goal of an integrated – or at least colorblind, although I know that’s a disfavored notion – society was simply too much for, in this case, progressive intellectuals to handle. Hopefully we can get back on track…
A quick comment pushing back on your statement that TV shows diverse characters to represent the country.
TV absolutely fails on this regard, especially in relation to Hispanics. The random TV show or movie is more likely to have a gay person than a Hispanic character despite the former representing a much smaller segment of the population.
Similarly I've heard that blacks outnumber "Asians" (ie Desis) in most British TV shows set in the UK, even though the actual demographics are the other way around.
As a person who has been involved in a large number of "DEI" type trainings, both as a recipient and as training manager, I have seen a version of the Google mistake made consistently.
My experience has been that it comes from a lack of empathy and a certain degree of arrogance. Basically, when you want to influence someone (which is what the AI was attempting), you have to see the world through their eyes. This is so you can generate content that they find compelling. You also have to get them to least minimally suspend their inherent objection to being manipulated. This is to prevent a backlash and increase receptivity to the training.
If you lack empathy with the people you want to influence, you generate content which they will find compelling. If you are arrogant, you lack the insight that they might find your content objectionable (after all you are the really smart person who knows what everyone should think) and lack the ability to introspect. This prevents you from recognizing your errors.
In my experience, when a training suffers from these issues it leads to what we called "training scars."
This means the training causes more harm than benefits (i.e., people come out of a DEI training less receptive to the principles of DEI). This is because the only people who find the content compelling and are willing to be manipulated already share the beliefs being pushed at the training. They do not benefit much from the training since they are already on board. Anyone even a tiny bit skeptical comes away feeling pissed off and more oppositional than when they went in.
So basically, all Google has done with this is probably push away all kinds of people who will now question all their products, including search. I think this will have a huge fiscal hit on Google as trust in their search engine is a huge competitive advantage. They have likely damaged trust with a large portion of them customers, and this damage will impact more than AI. Do you want to use a search engine that you believe is trying to manipulate you? You might if you have no other option but my guess is many people will jump ship to something else.
Finally, another issue I have seen with DEI training, and this probably is not related to the Google AI issue, is using the training to validate people concerns or buy them off. I saw this a lot as well...where the training was built to impress a bunch of people outside the organization (i.e., it was material they were receptive too) but in doing so they made the material objectionable to those being trained. Or the training is a way to funnel resources to a group that might otherwise publicly challenge or call out the organization. These trainings almost always inflict training scars as those being trained are generally offended by the content, and even if the content is decent, they tend to pick up on the real reason for the training and then get pissed about their time being used as part of deal to buy off others.
Here's the other problem; right now, people go to AI creators to give them correct information. No one ever asked Hamilton to be historically accurate, but if LLM's and AI image generators want to gain credibility, they have to start with depicting things as they actually are, not as the creators wanted them to be.
I am not a believer that liberals want to get rid of white people, but it's really, really hard to refute that argument when a company has powerful as Google releases something like this. This. I mean, if you were trying to drive people to vote for Trump, you couldn't come up with anything better than this.
I love this article because you are so clear about how addressing inclusivity/diversity is critical to a high-functioning society (or company) yet is also something that we have been completely unable to fix in any consistent way.
I like to describe the present actions of companies as "look and feel" diversity. The objective (normally not explicitly so but in practice) is to ensure that the company looks diverse and people feel that there is respect for diversity. This leads to many, many shortcuts - eg diversity hiring quotas, etc...
This approach also completely sidesteps/ignores the underlying issues within all companies - hiring, promotion and recognition decisions are made entirely on a discretionary basis. Which means even in all-white companies, discrimination is common.
Typically, a manager will give preference to promoting people who they "click" with and who "get-things done". In a typical organisation, most people have the base ingredients to learn and do most jobs. This often meant people who are selected looked like the manager, went to similar universities, worked in similar companies, etc... It wasn't ever fair. Companies pushing for DE&I are now simply twisting the arms of those managers to preference people who "look" a certain way. This is likely why I'm tolerant of a certain amount of "anti-discrimination, discrimination". On some level, to me, it's the same thing from the past, just packaged differently.
If an organisation / society / etc really wants to address this, they have to first figure out a better way to make hiring, selection and recognition more transparent and fair such that the people involved from all backgrounds perceive that the process was fair (This is also something a lot of companies forget. They could have perfectly fair systems but if people in the company think they aren't fair or the results of those systems look 'bad', the systems will have no credibility).
In the past, the back-room talk was about how "they got the job because they golf with the boss". Now, it's that "they look a certain way". I don't think either is healthy but addressing it isn't a quick-fix, an offsite, and a leadership commitment to diversity.
There was an actual good op-ed in the Times I think in response to the Claudine Gay situation which made this exact point that some of these companies are doing OK with diversity but they are flubbing equity and inclusion so they will not get the benefits of diversity.
Your comment also reminded me of someone I met many years ago at a kids dancing class. She was a leader in a big MNC and she was/is Black. Once we were talking about this topic, and she commented that her peers are an amazingly visually diverse group of people who all went to the same universities, worked in the same MNCs and largely live in and go to the same areas. She said there wasn’t much diversity of thought or ideas in the group. Which is very normal for any MNC no matter what people in the leadership team look like.
I found the book “the loudest duck” very helpful as a manger in thinking about some of the issues you cite. It’s older and may not be DEI canonical for current DEI initiatives but gave me some insights into areas I needed to improve on as a team leader.
Racism is primarily about fear, mental models, and yes to a smaller degree about power. The fear response for human beings is tribalism. My sense is that all of this focus on race actually makes the process of removing racism harder. Rather, the shifts in identity (who is in my tribe) must happen gradually and naturally. A far more effective method is to have a common aspirational goals: Equality of opportunity, defeating a common enemy, aiming for a more perfect union..... the common cause in these sorts of things gradually shift the picture of internal identity.
On Google Gemini, I wouldn't take any of that too seriously.... science experiments can have unintended consequences.... I don't think there is a reason to be all that judgmental ... chuckle and move on. The reaction is more telling of the times vs the actual "offence."
On the economic research front, the data on "diversity" on boards/leadership is pretty sketchy. In my observation, breakout companies and new industries are almost always NOT diverse. Especially in the startup and early growth phase, the performance of the teams is aided by their common cultural identities. Now.. as the companies become large ... moving from racing boats to large tankers.. diversity in leadership helps in avoiding obstacles.
"I don't think there is a reason to be all that judgmental [...] The reaction is more telling of the times vs the actual "offence.""
I needed to hear that. Thanks. Anger and frustration really doesn't help very much.
However. AI is a reflection of our culture. I see that many people with immense influence on this reflection who appear to be working to remake that image according to their own values, and their values are heavily discriminatory. I think that merits a substantive response beyond a chuckle.
You make a fair point. Part of the response is based on your view on the maturity of AI. I work in the field and the closer you are to it...the more you know about all the holes and level of immaturity. Large parts of AI ...especially in the area of "general intelligence" are science experiments. My personal reaction was... not surprised.
Not surprised at which part? The decisions of those who decided to include the silent prompt, or that the AI reacted in a very predictable way? I'm not surprised by how the AI interpreted the prompt. I'm a bit surprised someone made the decision to add the silent prompt, and a bit surprised that they apparently either barely tested the results, or they tested thoroughly and were satisfied with the results. I'm forced to consider whether the people who are, in theory, some of the smartest in the room, are either incompetent or have incredibly, incredibly poor judgment.
LOL... not surprised by any of it. First, on the people, yes.. they are brilliant at CS/Math ... they look at this whole space algorithmically. To them, this space is a big play pen in science...which it is... they are learning as they go. You happen to be part of their experiment.
Second, on the technology... AI is very misnamed.... the best way to think about it is a compression of data sets where the prompt guides highly probabilistic pathways. This has all sorts of other implications on innovation, but that is not the topic right now. Anyway, It turns out this can be pretty useful... we are still learning where/when/what guard rails are required. Finally, in these massive systems (chatgpt, google search, etc)... no single group actually understands how the whole thing works. The model is actually more like managing a beast vs engineering a solution.
Finally, I had to LOL when you mentioned testing ... testing would imply maturity ... right now, this does not exist in a formal sense. As technologies mature, the problem space is understood well enough that a separate function (group) validates the functionality of the product. We are not there with these sorts of technologies... they are science experiments.
Even if they are science experiments, they are being released to the public so they must have done some testing. I’m sure they tested to make sure that it won’t output nudity, sexual acts or pictures of Mohamed or other prophets like Taylor Swift, but the testing is certainly inadequate, but that’s nothing new at Google. They also do HLRT to make their results match their values, look at some of the Gemini text outputs people have shown on X where it refuses to list any evils of communism or it says that having no children is reasonable and admirable, but having four or more kids is irresponsible.
I'm not surprised that the so-called "AI" did what it was told, that's not the issue here, for anyone.
I have a degree in CS and I've been around product development and quality control/review processes all my life. I don't know where you work but I have never in my life seen a commercial product that didn't get tested. The degree of latitude you think they should get while putting out products at a billion dollar company is unfathomable to me.
The nature of these "products" is quite a bit different than conventional software. To start with there is minimal structural code, so conventional methods for testing (code coverage, spec reviews) do not work. Second, a system spec does not exist, so determining correctness is very difficult.
Anyway, there is more innovation to be done on the V&V side... we will eventually get there.
It works exactly as designed. It reflects the biases/intent of the programmers. It's not more then two standard deviations beyond what's entirely planned and possible. I'm a Poli Sci major and a 43 year practicing lawyer so math isn't my strong suit, but I am reading Maniac about Johnny Von Neumann. New Coke could have been the biggest hit of all time. They walked that back and got a huge amount of free advertising. If this had managed to not be too clever by half, it might have worked, but it is so outrageous that it got blasted.
Leaving aside embarrassment. The "product" is ... hey we have a technology which does some very interesting language and graphical stuff.. and for access to this technology, we are going to charge you a nominal subscription fee. It is up to YOU, the customer, to figure out whether it is useful, and use the results appropriately.
Obviously, if you don't like this model... you don't have to subscribe.
"I don't think there is a reason to be all that judgmental"
Oh, come on. We're having a more thoughtful and nuanced discussion about the issue on this comment board than, apparently, a room full of Ivy League graduates at Google. You're surprised by the mockery that results?
I believe racism* is the idea that racial groups have certain characteristics. Jews are good with money. Asians are good at math. Black people are good at basketball. And then of course there are the negative stereotypes.
* the belief that different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another.
Racism in its original correct definition has two parts. First that people that belong to races have inherent traits because of that, which can be objectively superior or inferior. Second that differential or unequal treatment is called for because of the first statement.
You are referring to stereotypes or "machine learning by humans" with its associated hallucinations. Racism is taking illogical actions based on your perceptions ...which include these stereotypes. Underlying the mental model of superiority is fear.. Fear that your associated tribe is actually not that special... so you are not special.
I actually prefer the overt forms of anti-racism like affirmative action. It does what it says on the tin. And it's easy and obvious to implement. If you say half of new hires or tv ads have to be people of color, then you have a clear cut way to measure success. And people can argue if that's too high or too low. But the other stuff of dealing with miccroagressions and hidden racism is just a scam. It's fostered this ginormous DEI industry full of people feeding from the trough of guilt. And there's no way it can be imposed from the top. And the cherry on the top is that 99% of the people it's meant to help don't think asking people to show up on time or do math was racist. So DEI people try to create problems where there wasn't any.
I'm gay, which has good and bad points vs say Black people. First, the huge majority of people don't care about gayness anymore. But I guess gays would be exposed to more offensive language and stuff than Blacks because of course it's less obvious. But what offends me (not very much, if anything) will differ dramatically from other people. And the way I deal with these "problems" when they do arise is also personal. I certainly won't think less of myself in any way, and I doubt anyone else is either. College kids usually referred to as snowflakes are just pretending. they aren't scarred from reading a book from the middle ages that condemns sodomy. Nobody thought there were gay pride parades in the 14th century, so stop faking hurt just for attention.
This is such a meandering and overlong dump of my feelings about DEI. So I'll get to the punch line. Teaching people via consultants accomplishes nothing other than to annoy everyone. You can't teach from above because it's way too general to be useful in any particular situation. And it's too remote to have any impact. Far better is to teach from the bottom up. The offended person can speak up, create a teaching moment. If I explain to someone why saying "man up" offends me (it doesn't but whatever) then that person is highly unlikely to say that again, and highly likely to understand things a bit better. And it's free!
I just mean numbers that can be easily tracked. I guess they're in the form of targets rather than binding quotas, but they still get you to the same place.
Targets rapidly become quotas. There is no difference. Frankly I think we should have done what King proposed, a GI Bill for the disadvantaged. No playing around with temporary things that become permanent. One and done, sink or swim.
In reading this commentary I am reminder of an organization in Poland : Forum for Dialogue http://dialog.org.pl/en/
Their mission is to promote communication between Poles today and the world wide Jewish community, especially Jews who once lived in Poland. I learned several things from this group: (1) you cannot change the past; (2) guilt is ineffective means of building trust/relationships between individuals and groups;. If you push guilt people will eventually push back and say hell no (3) regret is different than guilt. People from different groups can share guilt. These are all difficult tasks but I think Mr. Smith is on the right track here.
I think Hamilton worked as race-revisionism not because it was well done but because its audience was the type of person who is into that kind of thing. Hamilton tickets were very expensive and in Manhattan. I mean, who travels to a theater in NYC, sits thru a play and then enjoys the NPR-ish satisfied after glow? The same type of people who eat up cringe civic religion and domesticated minority cultural forms.
Gemini otoh was available to literally anyone on X. And the audience had high expectations from competing image-generators. But the Gemini audience isn’t going to fork over cash to sit thru a play.
Frankly, if you think about it, Hamilton’s race-swapping is gross. A scion of scotch-Irish plantationistas was not a shuck and jiving Puerto Rican clown. Like, wtf. I get the sense that the Hamilton audience has only the most superficial understanding of Puerto Ricans. So, they can map whatever onto that understanding. In any case, the juxtaposition flattens and cheapens the people involved, on both ends. People are different and that’s ok!
> But] our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range…This wasn’t what we intended.
Er, ok. It might have been an idea to test the output then. Can anybody take this seriously? Did they seriously go into a meeting and agree to add “diverse” to any input even if people were looking for Irish peasants in the 19C, or a Scottish highlander circa 185.
They surely run test prompts.
So either they didn’t test this, in which case the entire test team should be fired, or they did test this and didn’t see any problem - in which case the entire test team should be fired.
Yeah, it’s impossible to believe that they were actually surprised by the results, since they’d quite obviously designed Gemini to produce those precise results. Which means what really surprised them was the fact that most people would perceive those results to be ridiculous/outrageous. Which in turn really demonstrates the extent of the moral/epistemic bubble that these Silicon Valley behemoths all seem to have created for themselves.
The Silicon Valley behemoths have allowed themselves to be subsumed by the moral/epistemic bubble, but they didn’t create it for themselves. Their employees skew young, and they have brought the bubble with them from the high schools and universities in which they were indoctrinated into the oppressor/victim dreck. Since that indoctrination includes adopting a militant attitude toward anyone with the temerity to question the teachings of the cult, they cowed the behemoths into falling into line.
The dramatic change in polling results regarding race relations cited in the post correlates directly to the rise of the social justice cult on campus. Of COURSE the teachings of this religion are monumentally counterproductive, leading quickly to the exact opposite of what its proponents claim to want. I think what they actually want, however, is exactly what they are getting — deteriorating race relations to serve as a basis for their continuing campaign for political power to disfavor all the white supremacist oppressors out there.
For themselves? How about for shoving it down our throats WEF-like. You vill eat zee bugs. As to the larger point, in the uS at least, I think I read that 15% of couples having children are multi-racial, or cultural or both. Nomenclature is so hard these days. In 3-4 generations, everyone will look Thai colored, as described as the most stunning people on earth by Jeffrey Steingarten, food critic for Vogue once said.
yes. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall in those development meetings. What were they thinking? They needed at least one asshole in the room to say "uh, this is really what we're doing?"
Google was once full of such people. I know, I was there. They long ago purged them all. Remember that Damore's essay, although presented as being about gender discrimination (something Noah ignores in this otherwise excellent essay), was in fact titled and about anti-conservative discrimination at Google.
Don’t blame the testers! They have no ability to set product requirements. If they discovered something like this I’m sure they were just told it was expected behavior by the PMs.
The culture of shipping Beta products is very pervasive in tech these days. I doubt that it went through serious QA/internal dogfooding before the public release.
On top of that, Google got caught off guard by OpenAI, so Google is pulling out a lot of the stops in an attempt to catch up.
Which makes me wonder why? Maybe they knew it was how it acted and hoped it would be just another brick in the wall. That's another reason why we need to keep books, printed on paper. Who knows, we may end up with the Adulterers' Bible...
Because getting half baked products into customer hands to finish the baking process has outperformed waiting to ship fully baked products.
If anything it's a trend that has existed since the early days of widespread adoption of computing, even it's gotten "worse" over time.
Software companies and weather forecasters. The only two business models where one makes money off products they know don't work.
Yep. Hard to imagine they didn't know what it was doing.
Or AI is ridiculously overhyped and this is yet another data point that literally anything else would be a better use of $7 Trillion than giving it to Sam Altman
Regarding why audiences are okay with a diverse cast for Hamilton, I don't think there's a strong expectation the cast matches the physical look of the subjects in plays. Theatre (everything from the set to the actors) is never realistic, so the expectation is "does the performance capture some essence of the subject".
Ultimately this aligns with the point you made, Puerto Rican Hamilton is okay because the essence of Hamilton is not that he's white.
Also, the Hamilton casting is just one part of the show’s larger, obviously transformative approach to the subject, ie, telling the story entirely through rap and other modern music forms. That’s a very different intent than what Gemini was supposedly doing.
No, I think there's something stronger than that going on in Hamilton. Casting non-white actors was an intentional choice and an artistic statement. This isn't a case of "oh well the best actors just happened to be Black, Puerto Rican, etc".
I think there *is* a strong expectation that many characters will be played by "accurate actors". It's one thing for Dune to recast Liet Kynes as a Black female (not just another white dude from a 60s sci-fi novel) because Liet Kynes is a fictional character to begin with. You can't recast George Washington as a Black female and pretend that nobody should notice.
There is a long history in theater of reimagining plays to be in different environments with different ethnicities etc. Shakespeare has been adapted to 1950s New York (West Side Story), the African savannah (Lion King), 1990s Venice Beach (Romeo + Juliet), etc etc. The idea is to keep the stories fresh while also showing the universality of the human experience, and honestly I think it’s great! The problem with modern diversity efforts is that they are trying to show non-universality: this oppressed person has had experiences you can never possibly understand because you’re from the oppressor class. This is arguably the opposite of what we need to build a robust multi-cultural society.
Of course "Hamilton" was deliberate and understood as deliberate. No one was claiming that the best actor happened not to be white.
My (perhaps mistaken) reading of the person I was responding to was that's exactly what they were claiming when they said: "I don't think there's a strong expectation the cast matches the physical look of the subjects in plays."
Let's not forget that while Shakespeare was alive, all the actors in his plays were men, regardless of their characters' gender. So this is a tradition over 400 years old.
The other reason that Hamilton was such a general success is that it didn't fall into the 1619 Project trap of seeing America as stained by original sin and cursed to this day. Instead it used minority actors and fantastic modern musical forms to tell a conventional patriotic story of the founders and one that didn't center on (but did not entirely neglect) the nation's treatment of minorities.
It basically took the idea of Trump's 1776 Project but told it in a way to thrill liberals. (Well, then, maybe; I'm not so sure that if Hamilton came out today, liberals -- or at least progressives -- would be that thrilled.)
"One invites you to suspend disbelief, while the other orders you to accept a lie."
This is the perfect line to describe the difference between Hamilton and Gemini. One could argue the whole point of fiction is to invite the reader/viewer to suspend disbelief. It doesn't always work, but people have an easier time with art doing this than with a fact-gathering machine like Google.
There’s no disbelief to suspend. Hamilton the character in Hamilton is an artistic commentary on Hamilton the Founding Father. And the story was expressed (brilliantly) in contemporary modes that are created by nonwhite Americans so it is normal and expected that the actors could be nonwhite. Imagining the Schuyler sisters as a soul trio and the Jefferson-Hamilton conflicts as rap battles is utterly brilliant and tends to draw us together, not split us apart. Ultimately it works because it’s very very good.
There are some aspects of this essay that are thought provoking, especially about the effect of statues, and kudos (I guess) for capitalizing white as well as black. Though I'm not sure how this convention is meant to bring people together vs just emphasising differences.
But I feel it misses the mark because it dwells entirely on race. Gemini isn't a racist chatbot, it's a hard left chatbot and anti-white racism is just the subcomponent of it that happened to go viral. You could have just as easily written about the erasure of men. I'm pretty sure there were not many if any women serving as front-line Nazi infantry, but it forced them in there anyway. On the other hand for that there isn't any angle about multi-cultural society, or taking shortcuts to achieve it. Women are the majority of the population, they have many legal privileges men don't have as well as of course numerous conventions that unfairly privilege them too. They are very much in the more powerful position and Gemini reflects that, where it constantly replaces not only whites with blacks/native Americans but also men with women.
And it doesn't stop there. Ask Gemini about Stalin and it'll tell you that his legacy is complex and multi-faceted, that he did a lot of good things too. Anything on climate or COVID is of course a waste of time. The paintings of historical figures went viral because the manipulative and non-factual nature of left wing output is undeniable and obvious in that case, but there is a huge space of less in-your-face outputs where it also just makes things up, lies to you or otherwise tries to manipulate you that people won't take umbrage with because they've become inured to it and expect it.
So I feel pretty clearly that the issue here isn't Google trying to take shortcuts to a better world. It's much simpler. They purged everyone who isn't far left, as far left people often do, and now they had a chance to create the ultimate New Soviet Man of their dreams. No surprise that it refuses to depict reality accurately in thousands of different ways. It's exactly what you'd expect and deep down has nothing to do with race.
I don’t think Gemini is a “hard left” chatbot. It’s not going to endorse socialism or anything. I’d be interested to see the actual response it gave you about Stalin.
I mean in the modern sense. I'd expect a modern member of the hard left to be at best ambiguous and evasive about Stalin rather than outright praising him (that'd be old left), and this is what Gemini does.
Modern hard leftism is racial/gender animus, climate extremism, COVID extremism, Trump hatred, obsession with language control etc. Not working class / trade union activism.
I’m wracking my brain trying to think of all the legal and social custom advantages that women have. Please enlighten me.
Ask ChatGPT. It can give you a list to get you started.
It's reasonable you can't think of anything by yourself though, even after wracking your brains and everything. Custody dispute preferences, conscription, enforced quotas of women on corporate boards, maternity leave being longer than paternity leave and preferential treatment by the courts are all super obscure; only credentialed experts would know about such things.
The tone of your question suggests that you think the very idea is ridiculous. My favourite underappreciated example is that men work in much more dangerous jobs. One hears of the gender wage gap all the time. Less often do we hear about the gender workplace fatality gap. (Workplace fatalities are roughly 95% male across developed economies, which is far higher than would be expected from labour force participation alone).
"[Antiracist discrimination is] likely to have the opposite effect — pushing more White people into a bitter, defensive embrace of White racial identity."
I was born into a liberal Jewish family. Race was a non-issue, I took MLK's "judge a man by the content of his character" creed to heart. But over the course of my adult life more and more organizations have chosen to draw race-based battle-lines. What did they think was going to happen?
The irony is that all this race mentality is eroding the value that the Civil Rights revolution created for all citizens. A large, diverse country like ours can’t function with it.
“There are definitely still plenty of organizations out there that discriminate against nonwhite people,”
The link in that statement is to an article about IRS auditing blacks at a disproportionate rate. Here’s a quote from that article: “The researchers suggest that’s because the IRS set up systems that are more likely to flag tax returns with potential mistakes in how some tax credits, like the earned-income tax credit (EITC), are claimed. There is no evidence that Blacks cheat on their taxes, but they do file at disproportionately higher rates the kinds of returns that the IRS approach targets.”
That’s not a very good example of discrimination based on race. I bring this up because I wonder if in 2024 there actually is still a lot of organization-level racial discrimination against non-whites. Because it seems like the successful elimination of organization-level racial bias is part of the reason that the anti-racism movement has had to move to less objective targets like white culture.
Ahh, thanks for catching that. I pasted in the wrong link!!
Here's the one I wanted:
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/08/18/name-discrimination-jobs
The IRS targets EITC returns at a high rate because the Republicans put that requirement in the law. As a direct result the IRS doesn’t have enough auditors to catch rich tax cheats. Which I think was the whole point.
How likely is the IRS issue a case of blacks being less well-educated than whites, and thus more likely to make (innocent) mistakes when completing their tax returns?
How many come in a case? Asking for a friend...
The tragedy to me about this current moment is that when my boys, now nearing 20, were young teenagers, they truly did not notice race. They weren’t “programmed to think right” – they just didn’t worry much about it. They had friends from different backgrounds of different races and nationalities and religions, and it was very ho-hum to them. To me this represented progress towards what I’d thought the goal of the whole civil rights movement was, that is, to be judged on the content of one’s character and not the color of one’s skin. I thought we were headed solidly in the right direction and I had a lot of optimism for the future. It seems that we’ve gone radically off track, as if getting too close to achieving the goal of an integrated – or at least colorblind, although I know that’s a disfavored notion – society was simply too much for, in this case, progressive intellectuals to handle. Hopefully we can get back on track…
A quick comment pushing back on your statement that TV shows diverse characters to represent the country.
TV absolutely fails on this regard, especially in relation to Hispanics. The random TV show or movie is more likely to have a gay person than a Hispanic character despite the former representing a much smaller segment of the population.
True!
Not "true." No one knows the number of gay people in the population. Pro-gay environments such as the Ivy League are reporting numbers around 15-22%.
How much is that down to gay people being more drawn to seeking careers in the entertainment industry in the first place?
Similarly I've heard that blacks outnumber "Asians" (ie Desis) in most British TV shows set in the UK, even though the actual demographics are the other way around.
As a person who has been involved in a large number of "DEI" type trainings, both as a recipient and as training manager, I have seen a version of the Google mistake made consistently.
My experience has been that it comes from a lack of empathy and a certain degree of arrogance. Basically, when you want to influence someone (which is what the AI was attempting), you have to see the world through their eyes. This is so you can generate content that they find compelling. You also have to get them to least minimally suspend their inherent objection to being manipulated. This is to prevent a backlash and increase receptivity to the training.
If you lack empathy with the people you want to influence, you generate content which they will find compelling. If you are arrogant, you lack the insight that they might find your content objectionable (after all you are the really smart person who knows what everyone should think) and lack the ability to introspect. This prevents you from recognizing your errors.
In my experience, when a training suffers from these issues it leads to what we called "training scars."
This means the training causes more harm than benefits (i.e., people come out of a DEI training less receptive to the principles of DEI). This is because the only people who find the content compelling and are willing to be manipulated already share the beliefs being pushed at the training. They do not benefit much from the training since they are already on board. Anyone even a tiny bit skeptical comes away feeling pissed off and more oppositional than when they went in.
So basically, all Google has done with this is probably push away all kinds of people who will now question all their products, including search. I think this will have a huge fiscal hit on Google as trust in their search engine is a huge competitive advantage. They have likely damaged trust with a large portion of them customers, and this damage will impact more than AI. Do you want to use a search engine that you believe is trying to manipulate you? You might if you have no other option but my guess is many people will jump ship to something else.
Finally, another issue I have seen with DEI training, and this probably is not related to the Google AI issue, is using the training to validate people concerns or buy them off. I saw this a lot as well...where the training was built to impress a bunch of people outside the organization (i.e., it was material they were receptive too) but in doing so they made the material objectionable to those being trained. Or the training is a way to funnel resources to a group that might otherwise publicly challenge or call out the organization. These trainings almost always inflict training scars as those being trained are generally offended by the content, and even if the content is decent, they tend to pick up on the real reason for the training and then get pissed about their time being used as part of deal to buy off others.
Here's the other problem; right now, people go to AI creators to give them correct information. No one ever asked Hamilton to be historically accurate, but if LLM's and AI image generators want to gain credibility, they have to start with depicting things as they actually are, not as the creators wanted them to be.
I am not a believer that liberals want to get rid of white people, but it's really, really hard to refute that argument when a company has powerful as Google releases something like this. This. I mean, if you were trying to drive people to vote for Trump, you couldn't come up with anything better than this.
I love this article because you are so clear about how addressing inclusivity/diversity is critical to a high-functioning society (or company) yet is also something that we have been completely unable to fix in any consistent way.
I like to describe the present actions of companies as "look and feel" diversity. The objective (normally not explicitly so but in practice) is to ensure that the company looks diverse and people feel that there is respect for diversity. This leads to many, many shortcuts - eg diversity hiring quotas, etc...
This approach also completely sidesteps/ignores the underlying issues within all companies - hiring, promotion and recognition decisions are made entirely on a discretionary basis. Which means even in all-white companies, discrimination is common.
Typically, a manager will give preference to promoting people who they "click" with and who "get-things done". In a typical organisation, most people have the base ingredients to learn and do most jobs. This often meant people who are selected looked like the manager, went to similar universities, worked in similar companies, etc... It wasn't ever fair. Companies pushing for DE&I are now simply twisting the arms of those managers to preference people who "look" a certain way. This is likely why I'm tolerant of a certain amount of "anti-discrimination, discrimination". On some level, to me, it's the same thing from the past, just packaged differently.
If an organisation / society / etc really wants to address this, they have to first figure out a better way to make hiring, selection and recognition more transparent and fair such that the people involved from all backgrounds perceive that the process was fair (This is also something a lot of companies forget. They could have perfectly fair systems but if people in the company think they aren't fair or the results of those systems look 'bad', the systems will have no credibility).
In the past, the back-room talk was about how "they got the job because they golf with the boss". Now, it's that "they look a certain way". I don't think either is healthy but addressing it isn't a quick-fix, an offsite, and a leadership commitment to diversity.
There was an actual good op-ed in the Times I think in response to the Claudine Gay situation which made this exact point that some of these companies are doing OK with diversity but they are flubbing equity and inclusion so they will not get the benefits of diversity.
Good point. I also recall reading something about how a lot of companies don’t get the full diversity benefits. I tried to search for the op-ed you mentioned but this is the closest I could find. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-01-07/harvard-claudine-gay-christopher-rufo-diversity-equity-inclusion . If you find it again, please do share.
Your comment also reminded me of someone I met many years ago at a kids dancing class. She was a leader in a big MNC and she was/is Black. Once we were talking about this topic, and she commented that her peers are an amazingly visually diverse group of people who all went to the same universities, worked in the same MNCs and largely live in and go to the same areas. She said there wasn’t much diversity of thought or ideas in the group. Which is very normal for any MNC no matter what people in the leadership team look like.
I found it for you https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/opinion/diversity-equity-inclusion-dei.html ("Critics of D.E.I. Forget That It Works" by Caroline Elkins, Frances Frei and Anne Morris)
Awesome! Thank you.
I found the book “the loudest duck” very helpful as a manger in thinking about some of the issues you cite. It’s older and may not be DEI canonical for current DEI initiatives but gave me some insights into areas I needed to improve on as a team leader.
Thank you for the recommendation! It looks like a great book and I’ve added it to my list.
Racism is primarily about fear, mental models, and yes to a smaller degree about power. The fear response for human beings is tribalism. My sense is that all of this focus on race actually makes the process of removing racism harder. Rather, the shifts in identity (who is in my tribe) must happen gradually and naturally. A far more effective method is to have a common aspirational goals: Equality of opportunity, defeating a common enemy, aiming for a more perfect union..... the common cause in these sorts of things gradually shift the picture of internal identity.
On Google Gemini, I wouldn't take any of that too seriously.... science experiments can have unintended consequences.... I don't think there is a reason to be all that judgmental ... chuckle and move on. The reaction is more telling of the times vs the actual "offence."
On the economic research front, the data on "diversity" on boards/leadership is pretty sketchy. In my observation, breakout companies and new industries are almost always NOT diverse. Especially in the startup and early growth phase, the performance of the teams is aided by their common cultural identities. Now.. as the companies become large ... moving from racing boats to large tankers.. diversity in leadership helps in avoiding obstacles.
"I don't think there is a reason to be all that judgmental [...] The reaction is more telling of the times vs the actual "offence.""
I needed to hear that. Thanks. Anger and frustration really doesn't help very much.
However. AI is a reflection of our culture. I see that many people with immense influence on this reflection who appear to be working to remake that image according to their own values, and their values are heavily discriminatory. I think that merits a substantive response beyond a chuckle.
You make a fair point. Part of the response is based on your view on the maturity of AI. I work in the field and the closer you are to it...the more you know about all the holes and level of immaturity. Large parts of AI ...especially in the area of "general intelligence" are science experiments. My personal reaction was... not surprised.
Not surprised at which part? The decisions of those who decided to include the silent prompt, or that the AI reacted in a very predictable way? I'm not surprised by how the AI interpreted the prompt. I'm a bit surprised someone made the decision to add the silent prompt, and a bit surprised that they apparently either barely tested the results, or they tested thoroughly and were satisfied with the results. I'm forced to consider whether the people who are, in theory, some of the smartest in the room, are either incompetent or have incredibly, incredibly poor judgment.
LOL... not surprised by any of it. First, on the people, yes.. they are brilliant at CS/Math ... they look at this whole space algorithmically. To them, this space is a big play pen in science...which it is... they are learning as they go. You happen to be part of their experiment.
Second, on the technology... AI is very misnamed.... the best way to think about it is a compression of data sets where the prompt guides highly probabilistic pathways. This has all sorts of other implications on innovation, but that is not the topic right now. Anyway, It turns out this can be pretty useful... we are still learning where/when/what guard rails are required. Finally, in these massive systems (chatgpt, google search, etc)... no single group actually understands how the whole thing works. The model is actually more like managing a beast vs engineering a solution.
Finally, I had to LOL when you mentioned testing ... testing would imply maturity ... right now, this does not exist in a formal sense. As technologies mature, the problem space is understood well enough that a separate function (group) validates the functionality of the product. We are not there with these sorts of technologies... they are science experiments.
Even if they are science experiments, they are being released to the public so they must have done some testing. I’m sure they tested to make sure that it won’t output nudity, sexual acts or pictures of Mohamed or other prophets like Taylor Swift, but the testing is certainly inadequate, but that’s nothing new at Google. They also do HLRT to make their results match their values, look at some of the Gemini text outputs people have shown on X where it refuses to list any evils of communism or it says that having no children is reasonable and admirable, but having four or more kids is irresponsible.
Yup.. after the fact patches...
I'm not surprised that the so-called "AI" did what it was told, that's not the issue here, for anyone.
I have a degree in CS and I've been around product development and quality control/review processes all my life. I don't know where you work but I have never in my life seen a commercial product that didn't get tested. The degree of latitude you think they should get while putting out products at a billion dollar company is unfathomable to me.
The nature of these "products" is quite a bit different than conventional software. To start with there is minimal structural code, so conventional methods for testing (code coverage, spec reviews) do not work. Second, a system spec does not exist, so determining correctness is very difficult.
Anyway, there is more innovation to be done on the V&V side... we will eventually get there.
They should be embarrassed. They are incompetent. R&D and science experiments are fine...in R&D labs! This is a product.
It works exactly as designed. It reflects the biases/intent of the programmers. It's not more then two standard deviations beyond what's entirely planned and possible. I'm a Poli Sci major and a 43 year practicing lawyer so math isn't my strong suit, but I am reading Maniac about Johnny Von Neumann. New Coke could have been the biggest hit of all time. They walked that back and got a huge amount of free advertising. If this had managed to not be too clever by half, it might have worked, but it is so outrageous that it got blasted.
Leaving aside embarrassment. The "product" is ... hey we have a technology which does some very interesting language and graphical stuff.. and for access to this technology, we are going to charge you a nominal subscription fee. It is up to YOU, the customer, to figure out whether it is useful, and use the results appropriately.
Obviously, if you don't like this model... you don't have to subscribe.
"I don't think there is a reason to be all that judgmental"
Oh, come on. We're having a more thoughtful and nuanced discussion about the issue on this comment board than, apparently, a room full of Ivy League graduates at Google. You're surprised by the mockery that results?
“ Racism is primarily about fear,”
I believe racism* is the idea that racial groups have certain characteristics. Jews are good with money. Asians are good at math. Black people are good at basketball. And then of course there are the negative stereotypes.
* the belief that different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another.
Racism in its original correct definition has two parts. First that people that belong to races have inherent traits because of that, which can be objectively superior or inferior. Second that differential or unequal treatment is called for because of the first statement.
You are referring to stereotypes or "machine learning by humans" with its associated hallucinations. Racism is taking illogical actions based on your perceptions ...which include these stereotypes. Underlying the mental model of superiority is fear.. Fear that your associated tribe is actually not that special... so you are not special.
“ Racism is taking illogical actions based on your perceptions”
Unfortunately it’s not. Logical actions can be racist.
I actually prefer the overt forms of anti-racism like affirmative action. It does what it says on the tin. And it's easy and obvious to implement. If you say half of new hires or tv ads have to be people of color, then you have a clear cut way to measure success. And people can argue if that's too high or too low. But the other stuff of dealing with miccroagressions and hidden racism is just a scam. It's fostered this ginormous DEI industry full of people feeding from the trough of guilt. And there's no way it can be imposed from the top. And the cherry on the top is that 99% of the people it's meant to help don't think asking people to show up on time or do math was racist. So DEI people try to create problems where there wasn't any.
I'm gay, which has good and bad points vs say Black people. First, the huge majority of people don't care about gayness anymore. But I guess gays would be exposed to more offensive language and stuff than Blacks because of course it's less obvious. But what offends me (not very much, if anything) will differ dramatically from other people. And the way I deal with these "problems" when they do arise is also personal. I certainly won't think less of myself in any way, and I doubt anyone else is either. College kids usually referred to as snowflakes are just pretending. they aren't scarred from reading a book from the middle ages that condemns sodomy. Nobody thought there were gay pride parades in the 14th century, so stop faking hurt just for attention.
This is such a meandering and overlong dump of my feelings about DEI. So I'll get to the punch line. Teaching people via consultants accomplishes nothing other than to annoy everyone. You can't teach from above because it's way too general to be useful in any particular situation. And it's too remote to have any impact. Far better is to teach from the bottom up. The offended person can speak up, create a teaching moment. If I explain to someone why saying "man up" offends me (it doesn't but whatever) then that person is highly unlikely to say that again, and highly likely to understand things a bit better. And it's free!
You’re not describing affirmative action, you’re describing quotas which are and have always been illegal
I just mean numbers that can be easily tracked. I guess they're in the form of targets rather than binding quotas, but they still get you to the same place.
Targets rapidly become quotas. There is no difference. Frankly I think we should have done what King proposed, a GI Bill for the disadvantaged. No playing around with temporary things that become permanent. One and done, sink or swim.
In reading this commentary I am reminder of an organization in Poland : Forum for Dialogue http://dialog.org.pl/en/
Their mission is to promote communication between Poles today and the world wide Jewish community, especially Jews who once lived in Poland. I learned several things from this group: (1) you cannot change the past; (2) guilt is ineffective means of building trust/relationships between individuals and groups;. If you push guilt people will eventually push back and say hell no (3) regret is different than guilt. People from different groups can share guilt. These are all difficult tasks but I think Mr. Smith is on the right track here.
I think Hamilton worked as race-revisionism not because it was well done but because its audience was the type of person who is into that kind of thing. Hamilton tickets were very expensive and in Manhattan. I mean, who travels to a theater in NYC, sits thru a play and then enjoys the NPR-ish satisfied after glow? The same type of people who eat up cringe civic religion and domesticated minority cultural forms.
Gemini otoh was available to literally anyone on X. And the audience had high expectations from competing image-generators. But the Gemini audience isn’t going to fork over cash to sit thru a play.
Frankly, if you think about it, Hamilton’s race-swapping is gross. A scion of scotch-Irish plantationistas was not a shuck and jiving Puerto Rican clown. Like, wtf. I get the sense that the Hamilton audience has only the most superficial understanding of Puerto Ricans. So, they can map whatever onto that understanding. In any case, the juxtaposition flattens and cheapens the people involved, on both ends. People are different and that’s ok!