#also using the word ''global'' very broadly here don't @ me

[solarsyrup]

whenever I read about declining global birth rates, it feels like there's always gotta be some bit halfway through that's like

"Many claim that they're too poor/overworked/indebted to have children, but Dr. Richard Goldfuck, inventor of the prison industrial complex and one of the eight people richer than God, says that the real problem is people being over-educated and under-religious, so who knows!"

[astralfrontier]

Of course he was also a time traveler. I should have known.

"How are you doing this?" I had to ask him.

"Temporally, it's really easy." He'd explained the whole thing, like it was nothing. First, travel to after the crucifixion, appear to some of his followers, make some nebulous promises, and then...

Of course. He could just double back on his own timeline. But that would mean--

"Why would you do it? I mean.. you know you're gonna die. You'll be up on a cross for half a day. Tortured to death. And you're just a guy with a time machine. Hiding it in the tomb with a big stone over the entrance - that's good. But.. why are you gonna let them just kill you? Knowing what you know about how this religion develops - knowing it's the end for you."

"How can a man walks to his death, staring it in the face, you mean?" he asked, and I had the answer to my question in the soft tone of voice he used. It wasn't resigned. He knew what he was getting into.

"Yeah."

"Look. I know what people are going to do with the faith. I also know what would happen if they didn't. People always pervert religious impulses to serve political or economic needs. Hell, the Pharisees were an example right here, and they're just small fries on a global scale. The Romans are conquerors. Think about what would happen with the Roman mystery cults, the cults of personality, the syncretism. It was all very transactional. We pray to the gods, the gods give us what we want, vae victis whether you're Gaulish or Roman."

I leaned forward, considering what he was saying. "Okay, so, it doesn't matter who the gods are, because it's people who are doing the transacting, right? Religion is just an excuse to trigger the human impulse toward agency detection and community and all that stuff?"

He nodded. "Yeah, you got it. And it's not like I came up with anything particularly original. Dying and resurrecting gods are all over the place around this time period. What I'm doing here, the seeds I'm planting, take the power out of the hands of the state. People can have a direct relationship with the god - but it's going to spread more broadly than Judaism, for example, because it doesn't come with an attached cultural element. It's just a message. Love - love and community. Sure, bad things will come of it. But good things will too, and worse things would have resulted if I hadn't. It doesn't have to dominate. It's better if it doesn't, really. Let it be a cobblestone on the path."

I hadn't traveled too much. it sounded like he'd seen much, and more. I'd asked him about that.

"People are crawling towards paradise. They try to get up, they get knocked down by chance and circumstance and fear. The timid drag down the brave, sometimes for what they think are best of reasons, sometimes out of envy, there's so many reasons. But people have a need to keep walking, and when they can't walk any more, they push the people behind them forward."

"Like you're trying to do."

He grinned. "You got it."

I shook his hand, and said my goodbyes. A final impulse made me ask a question. "Hey. As an atheist, what do you think I'm supposed to do with all this, man? Giving you the last word, what do you think should be your legacy?"

He shrugged, and said the last words I'd ever hear from him. "Don't try to be perfect. Just be better. Believer or non-believer, secular morality or holy commandments, it's just like the gods. It's just an excuse. Just a reason for you to do what you know you have to do. Which is to just keep trying to be better."

You’re an atheist that used a time machine to prove Jesus Christ didn’t exists but instead you and him had a deep conversation in perfect English

[morlock-holmes]

Thanks for the context.

Please don't get me wrong: Google is being real stupid here and I'm mad at them too.

"

"If you ask for a picture of football players, or someone walking a dog, you may want to receive a range of people. You probably don't just want to only receive images of people of just one type of ethnicity (or any other characteristic)," wrote Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan.

But, as Raghavan wrote, the effort backfired. The AI service "failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range. And second, over time, the model became way more cautious than we intended and refused to answer certain prompts entirely — wrongly interpreting some very anodyne prompts as sensitive."

Researchers have pointed out that Google was trying to counter images that perpetuate bias and stereotype, since many large datasets of images have been found to contain mostly white people, or are replete with one type of image, like, for example, depicting most doctors as male.

In attempting to avoid a public relations crisis about gender and race, Google managed to run headlong into another controversy over accuracy and history."

This entire framing of the story, from both Raghavan and NPR, feels profoundly infantilizing to me.

Suppose I ask an image generator for "a boy riding his bicycle down the streets of a city."

What race should that boy be in the outputs produced by the generator?

Almost everybody is acting like there is a correct answer to that question, and, even more crazily, like getting the answer wrong would be so catastrophicly offensive that any product that gets it wrong should be taken off the market entirely.

You don't know if a user who types that prompt wants "only one type of ethnicity" and there's a good chance they don't know themselves.

How diverse should the outputs be? Should Chinese and Indian kids be more likely to appear in the results than anybody else? What should the ratios be? Should the fact that I typed the prompt in English change the ratios compared to a prompt typed in Chines? Users are not necessarily likely to generate thousands of images for a certain prompts so how often should less populace racial groups appear in the results? If people with broadly Inuit features are included in proportion to their percentage of the global populace they'll probably never show up so do we juice the results?

The idea that there is a correct set of answers to these questions at all seems incredibly unlikely to me, and the idea that getting those questions wrong would be catastrophic just strikes me as depressingly infantilizing.

You know what I can do if the output of the image generator is four white boys on bikes? I can just type another word in my prompt and say "an African American boy riding a bike down the streets of a city".

From a user perspective, what you'd actually want is controls for this kind of thing! Some kind of slider or even better, sets of sliders you could use to manipulate how widely afield the images move from central examples of the prompt.

Instead, both Google and the mass of Google's opponents seem to agree that there *is* a universal right answer, and that Google's primary job is to ensure that nothing the machine outputs will ever be controversial or range too far away from that right answer, and that the problem here is that Google has done a bad job at protecting us from controversy, and needs to be even better at ensuring the machine doesn't provide controversial outputs in the future.

It's fucking depressing.

PS - Also the idea that image generation outputs should be "historically accurate" is semi-baffling. I'll just say I didn't see anybody talking about whether those uniforms were actually standard issue for Nazis in 1943.

So apparently a Google image generator made some black Nazis or something.

The fact that people care about this, that they think there is some skin color that a fake Nazi, or a fake founding father, or whatever, *ought* to have in the absence of explicit user prompting is strong evidence that large portions of society have gone insane.

I can't even begin to tell you how infuriating it is to me that people care about this. It's a batshit set of priorities.

The correct race for a character in an image generator output is whatever the user asks for, period.

PS - This is a big reason I don't like the closed source generators, they feel that anything they generate reflects on the company so they're constantly working to make sure you don't have enough input into the image to do naughty things.