This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast kicks off with the Babylon Bee's take on Google Gemini's woke determination to inject a phony diversity into images of historical characters: "After decades of nothing but white Nazis, I can finally see a strong, confident black female wearing a swastika. Thanks, Google!" Jim Dempsey and Mark MacCarthy join the discussion because Gemini's preposterous image diversity quotas deserve more than snark. In fact, I argue, they were not errors; they were entirely deliberate efforts by Google to give its users not what they want but what Google in its wisdom thinks they should want. That such bizarre results were achieved by Google's sneakily editing user prompts to ask for, say, "indigenous" founding fathers simply shows that Google has found a unique combination of hubris and incompetence. More broadly, Mark and Jim suggest, the collapse of Google's effort to control its users raises this question: Can we trust AI developers when they say they have installed guardrails to make their systems safe?
The same might be asked of the latest in what seems an endless stream of experts demanding that AI models defeat users by preventing them from creating "harmful" deepfake images. Later, Mark points out that most of Silicon Valley recently signed on to promises to combat election-related deepfakes. In the 2010s, we all learned to hate the tech companies; in the 2020s, it seems, they've learned to hate us.
Speaking of hubris, Michael Ellis covers the State Department's stonewalling of a House committee trying to find out how generously the Department funded a group of ideologues trying to cut off advertising revenues for right-of-center news and comment sites. We take this story a little personally, having contributed op-eds to several of the blacklisted sites.
