> Those AI profiles included Liv, whose profile described her as a “proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller”
I find this stuff absolutely fascinating, that even an AI bot tries to do this sort of thing.
It just strikes me that there is no world in which racism will ever die out as long as things like this are happening. You can't have it both ways.
If race is just melanin content then we have no issue. That's the win case.
If your race is something that you need to proudly announce (because you personally feel that it has cultural connotations in most/many cases), then race is always going to be an issue, because of assumptions of those cultural differences.
You write this as if the AI itself independently decided to write that profile. That's almost assuredly not the case. Someone at Meta decided to make a bot that reinforced race identity and announce it, and likely tuned the LLM behind it to specifically do things to reinforce that identity and pretend as best as possible to be the exact menanin-informed expectation of its AI-generated avatar.
An AI bot didn't try to do this. Someone at Meta, who was likely none of the things in the profile, decided to do this.
> You write this as if the AI itself independently decided to write that profile.
There are numerous fake social media pages where posters oretend to be a minority, but are run by state actors to sow division in the US. Those have been extremely successful in fooling people; I wonder if its success is related to pre-existing biases readers already have in terms how they think "others" talk.
And the only way to construct an AI like that is to enumerate tainted stereotypes. It's an all around bad idea regardless of if you're pro-DEI or anti-woke.
Guess what, race is an issue and the group identity you're seeing is a defense mechanism against many generations of intentional cultural eradication and appropriation.
We should not be in the business of telling other people which aspects of themselves they can and cannot identify with. Admonishing black identity is perpetuating this cultural eradication, and so it is not the neutral position you think it is.
That's all tangential from the topic at hand anyway. On-topic, Liv is a great example of the corporate appropriation of culture.
> If your race is something that you need to proudly announce (because you personally feel that it has cultural connotations in most/many cases), then race is always going to be an issue, because of assumptions of those cultural differences.
No it's not. Acknowledging the current situation is not an assumption and does not doom us to push every single aspect onto future generations.
Culture is real. The way to change part of culture is not to simply deny that that part exists.
Would you say the same if the bot identified itself as being from a certain religion? Or working for a specific company? Having a random personality trait? Supporting a sports team? No one would bat an eye, and none of those would mean it is okay to discriminate against them on that basis.
Yea, if anything a bot that just reposts and talks about sports news for a specific team is kinda the perfect test case for something like this. It lets you test "identity" for a bot, but no one's going to be that upset if the Mets Fan Bot isn't sufficiently obsessed. Plus, it'll know all of the history and stats for the team, even if it'll probably be wrong a lot. Not that most human fans aren't wrong a lot about their sports teams' history.
there are things that bots, by virtue of being bots, cannot be - they cannot be of a particular religion, possess a gender, or have a particular race.
They can work for a specific company. They cannot have a personality, but they can exhibit personality traits.
Anything that a bot can do and possess I have no difficulty in its being labelled as doing and possessing those things.
Otherwise I do have problems, although theoretically a bot could exist as a piece of art and in that case we should forgive these lying claims to qualities they cannot possess by the current standards our society holds for artistic practice.
People will discriminate against people of color because they are visually people of color. Whether or not they 'announce it'. It's utter BS to suggest that the only reason people discriminate against black people is because they 'identify as black'.
Like, if all the black people would just stop identifying as 'black' racism would be solved?
Maybe I'm misreading your comment, but all of the responses to this suggest to me you're on a different planet than I am. Alternatively you drank the early 2000s kool-aid that "people don't see race" and thought that was actually working until people started identifying as the thing they get criticized on the internet for being.
I believe that many people in US are just pyromaniac firefighters that start fired to play hero extinguishing it. Racism is just one of the fires.
In my country (Eastern Europe) racism is approximately non-existent, but nobody was putting gas on fire for decades or more. I know a black guy that is quite famous around here, do you know what he never said? "I am a proud black person". He is a great person and people love him.
Ever heard of the Bosnian war? Many in eastern europe hate gypsies too. Maybe they don't discriminate on the color of skin specifically all, but they definitely hate based on culture.
I was in Sarajevo during those times for a couple of days, so I remember. Also in Pristina. Yes, many people in Eastern Europe used to dislike gypsies, when I was a kid it was widespread, but I never heard anything about this in the past 10 years. This fire is out, probably on a permanent basis.
2 things:
1. Just because you're not confronted with racism daily doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Boston is considered one of the most racist cities in the US, because once per sports game they scream the n-word at a black person. I'm like 99% certain I've heard similar stories in European countries.
2. The second part of your analogy is the "I know a black guy" trope that happens in the US. It's a pretty common thing, and no one believes people are 'not racist' just because they 'know a black guy'.
Terribly. I know from my grandparents and their Jew friends (40% of their small town were Jews), most did not survive (<5% after war), I met one in the '80.
How are they treated now? Asking my past 2 managers, both Jews, Israeli citizens doing business in Eastern Europe, they are happy with the current times. This fire is also put out.
Which part of Eastern Europe? I’ve lived in various parts of what might be considered Eastern Europe for most of my life, and while there isn’t a hyper-focus on race like in the US, I know that racism still exists. I still see it first hand.
I worked in the Balkans with a team that covered 9 countries (except Greece), I was doing trips all over the place on a weekly basis for several years. Currently living in Romania.
Can you provide some examples of racism? I am aware of some against Gypsies 40-50 years ago, but it is gone these days. Even that, it was against the culture, not the people, Gypsies going "modern way" were fully accepted, but traditions like kid marriage or living a nomadic life in carriages was not.
In this case I’m talking about overt, vocal racism against black and brown people in Poland and Ukraine where I have lived for several years.
That isn’t to say that I think central or Eastern Europe are outliers — I have personally witnessed at least as much racism in countries considered to be more progressive, like Sweden.
The point is, to say it’s virtually nonexistent is plainly untrue.
I find it hard to believe that someone would say something similar about any other aspect of cultural identity and not be instantly flagged for it.
Are you truly advocating that people should no longer be proud of their cultural identity? Are you applying that to all the folks in tech who proudly identify as Christian or Jewish? Does it apply to Italian Americans and Indigenous people? What about folks who are proud to speak endangered languages, like West Flemish or Romani?
>> Are you truly advocating that people should no longer be proud of their cultural identity?
My take on the comment was that so long as a trait is relevant to some people, it will be dispised by some other people. Either it's completely benign or it's somewhat polarizing. There are few things that only range from neutral to positive without detractors.
All of the examples you give are unique in their own ways, I don't have the wherewithal to go through them all, but if I choose one:
A person describing themselves as being Christian is only signaling that they are a follower of the Christian faith to some degree.
They are different for that reason. Christian doesn't have a physical appearance associated with it (well, other than say vestments or pendants).
All Christians are Christian.
Not all Asian-appearing folk are culturally Asian, not all culturally Asian folk are Asian-appearing. Even the concept of "Asian culture" (I do of course accept that such a concept exists) is super general in a much wider ranging way than the Christian faith. Maybe that explains it better.
To illustrate it in another way, imagine some LLM prompts:
"Hi ChatGPT, can you make me a poem written by a Christian about their faith?"
"Hi ChatGPT, can you make me a poem written by a White person about their culture?"
There is just a fundamental... grammatical wrongness(?) about the last one in my mind, I'm not sure that I can explain it if it's not already obvious.
Because my friend who just worked for years to become an American citizen after immigrating here and working for the US government still has other Americans tell him to "go back to where he came from" because he's evidently not American enough for them.
A hell of a lot of people want to "just be American" and a lot of Americans won't let them.
Some people are just angry and will direct it at whatever. Not saying it's OK, but once you really internalize the idea that people's reactions say more about themselves than about you life gets better.
That makes the bold assumption those people aren't your boss or your customers or your landlord or the policeman stopping you on the side of the road. There's real risk, both financially and physically, to just assuming that "random anger" is something you can internalize and ignore.
People who are "just angry and will direct it at whatever" can be very dangerous, as we've seen in the US even this week and in every school shooting and terrorist attack for years.
This is, terribly, the American experience. It used to be the Irish and the Italians before we decided they were "White enough." It doesn't mean we should just ignore it and accept it. If you're mad, that doesn't give you a pass to be a racist asshole to the first person less pale than a porcelain plate you see.
If anything, the fact that people have to know and cope with random Americans being this exact sort of racist asshole to them is the reason they form their own communities and see themselves as Black Americans or Asian Americans or any other sort of national or racial group.
> It’s because many of those “Americans” do not try to integrate, want to bring their culture with them...
That's okay, more varied culture enriches, and I enjoy the added richness.
>...and have a “what’s in it for me” view of [insert anything here].
That unfortunately describes a huge share of human beings on this planet.
> The label “X-American” (replace X with a foreign country) should not exist
I disagree: I think it's totally okay for people to recognize a part of their identity (key words: a part of, since a person's identity comes from many sources), rather than being forced to hide it.
> If you identify as this you are marking yourself as different from Americans.
Each individual (Americans included) is different from all the other billions of individuals on this planet (other Americans included), and that's okay. It would be weird to try to be forced to deny that totally-okay fact. Thus, a self-described Hoosier or Floridian or Cheesehead or Californian or Plumber or Texan might differentiate themselves similarly without renouncing any "American-ness". Adding one of many possible identity labels (whether race or origin or sports team or profession etc) doesn't negate all others.
> They will push for pro Indian initiatives (see H1B abuse, etc) at the expense of Americans. Ironically, this is also the cause of the discrimination they’ll face.
Ironically, this claim is itself racist: Asserting that people of a certain race are coming to get you because of their race, and thus discrimination against that race is justified, is racist (and a tired racist trope at that).
Unfortunately though, most racists I have seen are racist simply because they feel the other race is different from them, and feel that their victims are bad and/or deserve less than themselves. I've seen racists remark with nothing less than anger and disgust at baby pictures of children of other races. Babies, dude.
For another example, I'll open up and share an unfortunate case I had with a family member when we were visiting a science museum: Upon seeing how many non-white people were there, said family member made several off-color remarks to me. But these people (many of them children) weren't abusing anything, they weren't doing anything "at the expense of Americans". They were just normal people, many of them likely citizens, learning and having a good time. Them being interested in science isn't a problem, and they weren't stopping anyone else from coming to the museum. It's just that they were disproportionately represented among the sample of Americans interested in science. Good for them, science is good.
Except it doesn't. Look at the places that have the "happiest" people on earth, e.g. Denmark. They are monocultures where nearly everyone has the same traditions and history.
And in recent times they have had a lot more immigrants, and it's causing a lot of chaos.
Varied culture divides. It creates "us" and "them" groups, this is baked into our tribal psyche as humans.
I'm sorry to hear that you personally don't like the richness that other cultures add, but on the plus side, I do! :)
> Varied culture divides. It creates "us" and "them" groups, this is baked into our tribal psyche as humans
It takes someone seeking to divide, to divide. Embracing your culture and a part of your identity doesn't inherently divide anything. Ironically, the division often happens when someone says 'THEY embrace a culture I don't embrace, that must mean THEY are dividing us".
I recently went to an Ethiopian restaurant, enjoyed it, chatted with the owners, and didn't feel like they were dividing themselves from me, despite them embracing their culture. It'd be a shame for most restaurants to shut down because they embrace a culture that you don't embrace.
Have you considered the possibility that you are the one dividing people based on the components of their identity and culture and deciding which components are okay for them to have (because they match yours) and which aren't? Removing all culture but yours would be pretty boring (nothing personal, this goes for any monoculture).
Are you truly advocating that people should no longer be proud of their cultural identity?
(Shrug) If you didn't build it, what could possibly justify taking pride in it?
Pride in inborn cultural identity gets you things like Nazi Germany. It's not a win for either individuals or societies, only for intermediate subgroups whose interests rarely coincide with either.
It's not so much that the LLMs generate profiles like “proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller”, but they seem to generate such profiles at rates much higher (perhaps an order of magnitude) than the IRL versions of such actually exist.
We don’t know that bio was generated by an AI. I suspect it was written by one of Facebook’s team as part of the “prompt”. It matches how I’ve seen meta engineers talk about black women.
Race is clearly cultural in todays society because we can make it so. Very unlikely to be genetically culturally if that is what you are saying (but of course, who knows).
What I'm saying is that it the AI to me illustrates how much of a self-own drawing these cultural battle lines is.
If you choose to describe yourself by the colour of your skin first and foremost then you're telling everyone that you think that's relevant information which is, well.. the entire problem - you're telling everyone around you that you think it has predictive power.
But that's what racists are, people who think the race of a person has predictive power with regard to their nature, culture etc.
We can't expect people whose lives are, in great part, defined by the societal oppression they face, to be at the forefront of trying to erase the distinctions the bigots hold over them – not least because it'd be ineffective, serving only to hide the abuse. The categorisation schemes used by bigots (e.g. racists) do have predictive power: for the behaviour of bigots, and the resulting effects on the social context of people's lives.
People being loud and proud about their marginalised identities is not a problem. The pushback, and the pushback-to-the-pushback, and the pushback-to-the-pushback-to-the-pushback (the so-called "culture war") is a problem to the extent it gets in the way of solving the root problem (marginalisation, bigotry, and abuse), but statements of pride help address the root problem.
Rather than criticise "drawing these cultural battle lines", please fight the fight you think people should be fighting. You won't find yourself short of allies, should you make the effort. (Effort includes educating yourself about the relevant issues: it's pretty easy to find highly-specific resources. If you're completely stuck, and somehow have lost access to Wikipedia, visit your local library.)
Being proud of your identity and culture is not a problem at all!
The thing that I feel that this silly AI bot draws into sharp contrast is the idea that there can simultaneously be "asian/white/black culture" - as a generalised thing, not a person's experience in a neighbourhood or a country, literally just "white/black/asianness" (or whatever), and obviously the connotation there is that skin colour is intrinsically linked to culture, but then we expect people to pretend that skin colour has no correlation.
You can't have it both ways, it's a contradiction.
And here we have, err, a computer program, or the output of one, pulling in all of this stuff and claiming that it has a culture based on experiences of being a skin colour that it doesn't and can't even have.
That's a false dichotomy. The "intrinsically" connotation is not there (you're reading that in), but civil rights activists often discuss the relationships between culture and skin colour. Any book (or Wikipedia article) on the subject should provide this information, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory.
I do agree that the AI bots were farcical, but they don't highlight what you're saying. You're talking about nth-degree pushback-to-pushback as though it's the actual facts-on-the-ground, which it's not. (The "culture war" is composed solely of the assumption that there is culture war, and people's responses to that: unlike the real issues, like systematic oppression, it'll go away as soon as we stop talking about it.)
To be fair, how the term is normally used depends entirely on the group within which the term is being used. For many, racism is strictly “prejudice + power”, which logically concludes in the [in my opinion rather warped] idea that some groups are incapable of racism, which is at odds with the definition you’re citing
You're right, but in practice I don't really consider it as being too fundamentally different because it's the logical conclusion from strong enough predictive power.
There is nothing "logical" about the progression from my appearance and ancestry is something I'm entitled to be proud of; also there might actually be such a thing as Black American culture to racial epithets and Jim Crow laws. Or indeed using "predictive power" to assess people's intellectual ability or criminal propensity from their melanin content.
I mean, do you believe that people should expect to be subjected to the weirdest and most hostile takes on gender relations and treated as potential rapists or sluts unless and until everyone uses gender neutral pronouns (even silly bots mostly identify as male and female at the moment)? If not, what is it about racism that obliges victims not to affirm their identity if they wish to cease to become victims?
I understand Elon and Pmarca to be saying that this behavior is programmed in by 'safety teams' at Meta.
It is an odd way of calcifying late-20th century American upper class anxiety. If we can't give the engineers a different moral goal, it will become the default mode of knowledge. A more immediate problem than "AI will kill us" is the dev teams determined to avoid "erasure" or "digital genocide" or whatever they'd call a race/culture-agnostic AI.
Yes, races are clearly total bollocks. I don't know why you've gotten any other conclusion from what I've written here which is why I'm confused, you seem to be agreeing with me angrily.
> If your race is something that you need to proudly announce (because you personally feel that it has cultural connotations in most/many cases), then race is always going to be an issue, because of assumptions of those cultural differences.
This seems to put the burden on the minority. Without getting into details it does not make sense in my mind to put the burden on the party with less power.
You're missing the nuance that while they are invented they are used in real ways and cause real effects. That's what I tried to point out to you in my original response. So your assertion that it's either they are based on nothing or people can say it matters is a false dichotomy. They are invented but also the have been used throughout history to segregate people and cause peope to have differing life experiences. So it's not unjustified for someone to say their race has a lot of impact on their personal life experience and thus identity.
To understand the "race is a social construct" thing, it's helpful to (1) consider border cases and ambiguities and (2) consider history
1. Breaks down especially with the existence of mixed race people. Did you know that there was a term for Americans born with 7 European great grandparents and 1 black one? Many of those were born into slavery and treated horribly for being black.
Which touches on 2... But also, the Irish were not considered white. I've seen horribly racist British illustrations of the 19th century comparing Irish people to Africans. In that century in the United States, Italian and eastern European immigrants were also not considered white.
When you consider these ridiculous corner cases, and how their perceptions have changed over time, it makes you aware that the categorization itself isn't really based on logic and reason or facts, even when generalizations hold up "better". Yes, for the most stereotypically appearing people, we'll probably correctly guess their ancestry a lot of the time based on things like appearances. But it falls apart pretty quickly. You don't need to get into extreme outlier cases as above for you to miss something when you treat racial categories as unambiguous facts.
Why do people bring this up then, any time race is mentioned? It's such a trivial point to make, it doesn't add anything.
Ok, so "black" or "White" are not absolutely clear labels that we can use to describe every single person ever. No shit... Still, Morgan Freeman is black and Margot Robbie is White, and I'm White because both my parents are White, and if there's a serial killer roaming the streets then knowing if he's "black" or "White" is very useful information so I know what to be on the lookout for, etc.
It's like those insufferable people who can't wait to point out that "A tomato is actually a fruit!" any time it comes up in conversation. Ok, so what? "Race is a social construct!" Ok, so what?
It's the contradiction that I'm describing in my post, I think.
Obviously black and white skin colours exist as do things like physical features.
The social construct is that people tie those to identity. Both within and without the group. But then it seems as if that is self-perpetuating.
People can have perfectly valid reasons to dislike culture, so if we tie culture to appearance, then people are going to make judgements and dislike people of certain appearances as a logical consequence of that, which sucks.
But if I understand the angle of "social constructioners" correctly, they're not disputing that what we might call 'ethnicities' or 'tribes' exist (ie. a group of people of common ancestry and with a distinct genotype), it's just that trying to lump the thousands of these into a few broad categories, like "black", is far too crude to be useful.
But ethnicities still exist. So would it not be valid to be "ethnicist" (ie. very specifically racist), like "Those Sami people are so x" or "Gosh those Bantu people are y"?
Ethnicities and tribes and inclusion therein are ambiguous, and it changes over time. Look at any society and its history. They're not homogeneous. All the historical countries and tribes were multiethnic.
One example is Rome. Every region or province, even Italia, consisted of different ethnic groups. At one point there was a diverse group in a small area called the Latins. The Romans were a single ethnic group in Latium who first took over and assimilated the other Latins who were distinct, then whole peninsula absorbing Etruscans and celts and Greeks in the south and others, absorbed people from all over Europe and north Africa and Asia minor...
But it's fashionable among young internet white supremacists to say these were all pasty white dudes.
The truth is it's an anachronism to compare racial categorizations from two different time periods where differences were not seen in the same way or with the same context. Afaik the Romans didn't really have a construct of race that was the same as our modern ones. And they assimilated and erased many distinctions over time.
What's stopping me from identifying variation in the frequency of different traits between ethnic groups in the current day? It's not a virtue to pretend not to notice such things (or, indeed, to be truly incapable of the most basic pattern recognition).
I think the argument could then be made that if you identify traits common to closely related tribes (eg. indigenous East African) that are noticeably different from the frequency or magnitude of these traits in a different cluster of closely related tribes (eg. indigenous Scandinavian) then there should be no reason to pretend to ignore them.
People frequently seem to think that identifying these traits is a permanent thing or a fact of nature, rather than as you say, a statement about the current day (and I would add, an often inaccurate statement based on corner cases like those I've mentioned). To make it more than that is a mistaken notion. You can justify a lot of ugly racism that way. Many people do and have.
As an example, slavery in the US created an artificial category or label of black people out of many unrelated peoples, calling them inferior by nature and using that to justify unethical systems.
Ronald, your comment is flagged and I cannot reply. I think it is possible that you are the one working backwards, i.e. you want to consider your opinions on race to be a fact of nature and you get defensive when I point out that this is shaky ground to stand on, so you think I am trying to justify an ideology you are opposed to and attribute some kind of ill will to me. It is not controversial ideology to say for example that slavery was ethically questionable and not based on a good scientific understanding of the origins or nature of man. If you find yourself eager to defend slavery on racial grounds you may want to do some introspection, rather than point fingers at people who tell you this.
It's a fair point that some indigenous African bushmen, even today, spend time watching lions and pressuring them off of fresh kills in order to take home the leftovers, as they have done for centuries.
It's equally fair to observe that the offspring of those very same bushmen when transfered to a Scandinavian country may spend more time word processing or catching trains.
A social construct or construction is the meaning, notion, or connotation placed on an object or event by a society, and adopted by that society with respect to how they view or deal with the object or event.[8]
The social construction of target populations refers to the cultural characterizations or popular images of the persons or groups whose behavior and well-being are affected by public policy.[9]
Social constructionism posits that the meanings of phenomena do not have an independent foundation outside the mental and linguistic representation that people develop about them throughout their history, and which becomes their shared reality.[10] From a linguistic viewpoint, social constructionism centres meaning as an internal reference within language (words refer to words, definitions to other definitions) rather than to an external reality.
I find this stuff absolutely fascinating, that even an AI bot tries to do this sort of thing.
It just strikes me that there is no world in which racism will ever die out as long as things like this are happening. You can't have it both ways.
If race is just melanin content then we have no issue. That's the win case.
If your race is something that you need to proudly announce (because you personally feel that it has cultural connotations in most/many cases), then race is always going to be an issue, because of assumptions of those cultural differences.