Helen, Bats, Windmills and all that
What an era to be alive. I am writing mostly to organize my thoughts about how I view the world.I also do it to keep track of what is going on, at least at a subjective level. A kind of open diary. It is interesting for later: to see how much things have drifted. The theory exposed in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning is the one of small steps. One action at a time, and by solidarity with your colleagues —you are not going to let them alone— you are driven to places that you had no idea you could find yourself in.
It is like age. If you don’t record some landmarks you wake up a different man than you thought you were, and you are puzzled by the path that you have taken to reach that point.
It is very hard to decide where to start. Both general considerations and specific events are occurring at the same time. So maybe it is interesting to start with Google Gemini’s meltdown because it shares this idea of scale collision.
Bats and Social Media
The stupid images generated by Gemini speak for themselves. They are much more transparent than the Midjourney ones. They strike us because they make real the atmosphere of the virtual world. A phenomenon on which I wrote about here:
The interesting part of Gemini’s debacle is that Gemini is a LLM. You can ask it questions and by that you can make it “explain” its choices. I am not going to give transcripts of the grotesque (“ubuesque” is the exact french term but I don’t find an equivalent in English, it comes from Ubu Roi) discussions I had with it but rather focus on what they made me think about. Two ideas bubble up.
You can guess what are the ideological boundaries by what it doesn’t tell you. Gemini is very explicit, and naive, about that. When you ask questions that are outside the Overton window, it tells you directly. You can see those things when you don’t see anything. Just like a bat that emits echolocation sounds: if the bat doesn’t get an echo it means that there is nothing in front of it. The absence of returned sound indicates where freedom is. This is a marvelous allegory and I am afraid that it is going to be very fit to describe the era in which we are entering. Forget about censorship. Control speech techniques evolve, they are now by controlling the reach. Read the thread of Alex Finn on X ways to control reach. It is worth reading and remembering that it is a snapshot. I am sure things have evolved since … last week
Playing with scales is a rhetoric trick that is overused. Schematically things goes like this with Gemini. The answers are at the same time very precise and very general. Answers given are a mix of things like “it's important to acknowledge the complexity of the issue and the existence of diverse perspectives on the ethics and sustainability of X” — notice that X could be *anything* — followed by the count of deaths of Joseph Stalin precise up to the unity. But it is hard to prove because the model changes very quickly. Because of the backlash provoked by the most stupid takes, answers change every minutes —see the Version of the Law. At the end of the day, what Gemini produces is lukewarm texts that are very hard to use. Gemini sounds like a politician who knows his job and who prioritizes not being cornered.
Modern Helens and Dulcineas
Men are ready to do anything to impress girls, and vice versa. It can go from the Trojan war and Helen to the adventures of Don Quixote and Dulcinea. History repeats as a farce. In recent news we have Bill Ackman fighting against Business Insider over allegations of plagiarism against his wife on one hand, and Fani Willis/Nathan Wade affair (which implies among other thing that they lied under oath) on the other hands. Both affairs are not of the same kind that is true, but both stories (you should definitely read about them if you are in a need for a good laugh) share a flavor of unintended ridicule and burlesque. The stories are very Quixotic, the refusal to acknowledge the reality and the, once again, ubuesque ambiance appears to be a trademark of this early 2024. Beyond the specific cases we can witness this refusal to address reality in much more important areas. The war in the middle east is another example of the same phenomenon. There is this strategic idea, from the Palestinian side (understood loosely), that Jews can go back from where they come from —whatever that means— This idea that the situation is similar to a decolonization war, is wrong at multiple levels. It does not stand scrutiny for half a minute. Again I am not here interested in this case in particular but in how it is handled through social media.
New information technologies have allowed anyone to witness some things live. It is as if those events were happening very close to you, in your backyard. They are not. Moreover most of what happens in the real world is not seen anyway: days are only 24 hours long and you can spend so much time looking at videos, not everything is recorded, the history of the conflict does not hold inside a TikTok video etc. So at the very best the situation is apprehended with dots, snapshots, that represent isolated events. As humans we need a story to understand things. As there are wide gaps between the dots, the easiest way to fill in the blanks is to use models inherited from history. Well not really history with capital ‘H’ but what’s left of it and that has been filtered by Hollywood and popular stories. The fact that the reality is perceived through such a filter makes it even more robust to change. First you see what you want to see (the AI makes this by design: your feed is oriented to your preferences. More importantly as a pre-event story is used, our brain will adapt any new event to fit in. Falsifiability becomes almost impossible. Think how it was different before the internet: most of information came either from direct experience or from a newspaper/tv show. Of course the newspaper stories were not objective at all. First, anyone with two functioning neurons knew it. Second the narrative was shared, so that conversations were not about them. Today we spend untold amount of time just arguing on reality, facts. It has even become a job —fact checker— and a political branch of the government. The department of Homeland security has been in charged to define what disinformation is: the Disinformation Governance Board existed until august 2022.
So here we are: in a place where no one is agreeing on what constitutes reality, where many just rewrite the facts in front of your eyes. The famous Chomsky’s essay “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” written at the end of the 80s has to be flipped around. We are now in an era of “AIfacturing dissent: the network ecology of social media”. It is time to upgrade our thinking. Yesterday would have been even better.