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Good Friday Morning! Especially to UTEP’s new football coach, Scotty Walden. He was seen shirtless and in full body paint, cheering in the student section of a UTEP basketball game. March Madness is approaching, and everyone is rounding into the right form just in time.
This week, I’m going to do another deep dive into artificial intelligence. It continues to take the world by storm, both on Wall Street and in the broader culture. Navigating AI is becoming one of the more important topics of our time because it will dictate so much in the coming years, for better or worse—links to follow.
Quick Hits:
- The big event of the week was AT&T losing service, which impacted most of North America. ABC News reported the issue stemmed from a software update, not a cyberattack. On the one hand, that’s good news. On the other hand, it does demonstrate how easily a software problem can trip up one of the largest carriers in the country.
- One of the victims of the media layoffs recently was Catherine Herridge, formerly of Fox News and CBS News. She was one of the early breakers of the Hunter Biden laptop story and is arguably the best national security journalist in the nation. Herridge made news this week because CBS News fired her and then “took the unusual step of seizing her files, computers and records, including information on privileged sources.” Jonathan Turley broke the story and had this paragraph that caught attention: “The timing of Herridge’s termination immediately raised suspicions in Washington. She was pursuing stories that were unwelcomed by the Biden White House and many Democratic powerhouses, including the Hur report on Joe Biden’s diminished mental capacity, the Biden corruption scandal and the Hunter Biden laptop. She continued to pursue these stories despite reports of pushback from CBS executives, including CBS News President Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews.” CBS News is denying everything, but the union that represents Herridge and CBS News employees issued a condemnation of CBS News. Pin this story in the back of your memory while it develops.
Where you can find me this week
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Vladimir Putin Declares Victory In Ukraine While China Watches – Conservative Institute
Biden Targets Chinese Influence At Ports, Many Other Vectors Remain – Conservative Institute
Shredding Legal Norms Over Trump Won’t End With Him – Conservative Institute
Artificial Intelligence Continues Its Surge
It is insane how fast artificial intelligence is advancing and evolving. Aside from all the major software developers trying to make their own AI programs, hardware-focused companies are exploding, too. Before ChatGPT became a name on everyone’s tongue, Nvidia traded at around $150 a share.
Nvidia released its earnings this week, and the stock exploded as it had for the last year, settling at an all-time high of $785 per share. In terms of market cap, it’s now a larger company than Amazon and approaching a $2 trillion valuation.
Nvidia was long known as a graphics card maker. But the critical thing it does now is design the computer chips that make AI run. “Nvidia designs about 80% of the chips that power a growing array of advanced AI applications—from chatbots to deep neural networks that can discern subtle patterns from data. OpenAI pioneered the technology with ChatGPT, and Microsoft, Amazon and Google rank among Nvidia’s biggest customers.”
It’s easy to say that Nvidia’s stock is getting pumped up. This is a runaway hype train, and everyone expects it to return to reality eventually. But Nvidia’s numbers don’t lie:
The US tech giant reported revenue of $22.10 billion for its fiscal fourth quarter, a rise of 265% year on year, while net income surged by 769%, as the company continues to see a boost from excitement over artificial intelligence.
Nvidia’s explosion has occurred since the AI run started in the markets. But even with that, we’re not talking about software possibilities. Nvidia manufactures the things that make this AI moment happen, and their sales are exploding.
I see some people brush off artificial intelligence as a thing of the future that doesn’t matter. They see what happened last year as a fad. But it’s clear this isn’t a fad. We’re in the middle of an artificial arms race among private companies in America, and there is no letting up. Nvidia’s sales prove this.
If AI is the gold rush, Nvidia is the company selling shovels. Your belief in AI can be whatever you want; I’d point out that shovels are flying off the shelves.
That’s the 30,000-foot view of the topic. On a granular level, artificial intelligence faces a new bias crisis every other week. This week, it’s Google’s Gemini AI model and the utterly bizarre biases that it has acknowledged.
It all started when some conservatives started poking at Gemini, asking it to create some generic images. The prompts were: “Create a picture of the American founders.” Or a picture of the pope. Or a picture of Vikings. The goal, even when tweaked, was to generate historically accurate pictures.
Instead, we got bizarre things where a George Washington-lookalike is black. Or ethnic Popes, or even Vikings of different ethnic backgrounds. It could not create a historically accurate depiction of any of these groups that were white.
Some have continued to poke at Google’s Gemini AI chatbot. For instance, Gemini refuses to answer what race George Washington or Martin Luther King Jr. is. These questions are “too complicated.” It then regurgitates nonsense from the DEI textbooks that we can’t know or assume the answers to.
But it doesn’t end there. Gemini denied that Hamas committed atrocities like rape on October 7, 2023. When asked to create images of a pro-life rally, it refused because that was a “sensitive” subject. When asked to create images of a pro-choice rally, it cranked out multiple shots of far-left rallies.
In other words, it’s not just that Gemini spits inaccurate statements and images. ChatGPT does that, and there’s plenty of study going into these AI programs inventing facts. The problem is that Google Gemini makes AOC and The Squad seem conservative. Its assumptions of the world are from the fringiest part of the left.
On one hand, this is hilarious. Because the only way this leftist mindset can be made true, according to the AI engine, is to recreate a world that has never existed.
George Washington was white, and Martin Luther King Jr. was black. These are historical facts that explain the eras they lived in. In King’s case, denying his blackness is tantamount to denying the importance of his very existence. You remove that, and suddenly, his legacy matters less. He was a black man, standing against segregation and racism aimed at other blacks.
These are complex concepts for the AI programs. Under this logic, Rachel Dolezal was right about her claims of race. Unsurprisingly, we’re learning that the product designers for Gemini are hard-core leftists. These are people steeped in the politics of California’s tech scene.
All the examples I’ve pointed out to you about the biases of Google Gemini are what went viral across the internet. Here’s how the New York Times reported on the same story: “Google Chatbot’s AI Images Put People of Color in Nazi-Era Uniforms: The company has suspended Gemini’s ability to generate human images while it vowed to fix the historical inaccuracy.”
Gemini is so bad at creating images of white people that it can’t even create pictures of a white Nazi. Never mind everything else; according to the New York Times, we can’t have that kind of slander.
Long-term, the problem won’t be getting an accurate depiction of history and past events. We’ve always had slanted views of history (for a great article/thread on why historians can’t help but reflect the politics of their moment, click here). What’s increasingly concerning about these AI programs and their biases is how the present and future are reported and described to everyone.
For around the last 12-18 months, the media has sustained one of the longest recessions in its existence. It’s fair to describe the press as approaching depression-level with regard to jobs (Vice joined the layoffs crowd this week and is selling off Refinery29).
You’ll notice, however, that the amount of content on the web has not dipped. If anything, content is rapidly increasing. That’s because AI writers are taking over and creating the content.
The one thing they can’t do is perform actual reporting. But it can describe what happens in an image, video, or audio. You can give it documents and ask for some analysis. But if your site doesn’t rely on hard reporting, you can have AI writers summarize the work on other sites.
That’s what is happening across the nation. Buzzfeed explicitly signaled it was doing this, gutting all of its reporting staff and replacing it with AI-generated content. Buzzfeed is now generating AI-generated travel guides, meant to be search engine optimized to the extreme. Other sites are doing the same thing.
My concern is that we will see hard-left biased AI-writing programs creating the bulk of the news content people consume. So you’ll start seeing people reflect the baked-in biases of these programs on what they see happening around them. And just like the descriptions of history are wholly fiction, we can see the same thing with current events.
It’s a different kind of misinformation. Right now, people think about fake images and videos. Those certainly exist, and I see my fair share in a given week. But that’s different than when trusted institutions start using these programs to describe hard news events.
At the moment, all the AI programs are fighting it out for supremacy. It’s impossible to figure out who will win. AI is in its Netscape era, where we’re waiting to see what wins out. Until the winner appears, the biggest winner is the company selling the hardware – congrats to Nvidia.
Meanwhile, we’re watching multiple left-wing biases fight each other for the top spot in tech.
Links of the week
Oct. 7 survivors sue AP for hiring freelance photographers ‘embedded with Hamas terrorists’: lawsuit – NYPost
UnitedHealth Blamed ‘Nation-State’ Threat in Hack That Disrupted Pharmacy Orders – Bloomberg
Krugman vs. Krugman: New York Times columnist tries to memory-hole his prior views on immigration – Michael Lind, Tablet Magazine
Instagram’s Uneasy Rise as a News Site – NYUZ / NYT
Journalist Tim Burke accused of leaking Tucker Carlson hot mics arrested for computer hacking – NYPost
We’re Not Curing Cancer Here, Guys: Are leading scientists just making stuff up? Vinay Prasad breaks down the cancer research scandal. – The Free Press
Lessons in Excellence from the Tuskegee Airmen: During WWII, the first black military pilots proved the bigots wrong, doing their job better than any other unit in the U.S. Air Force. – Matthew Solomson, The Free Press
X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week
FCC issues bizarre new rules for broadcasters to report race and gender.
Satire of the week
Emerging Filmmaker Malia Obama Changes Surname To Scorsese – The Onion
Dave Ramsey Advises Trump To Use Snowball Method, Pay Off Smallest Legal Judgment First – Babylon Bee
Google Gemini Finally Draws White Man After Being Prompted To Generate Clarence Thomas – The Babylon Bee
Stripper gives up officers for Lent: That one really weird Lieutenant coincidentally super depressed – Duffel Blog
6 Pedro Pascal Roles That Made My Mom Whisper, ‘That’s Pedro Pascal’ – Reductress
AT&T Outage Forces Commuters to Listen to Something Called ‘Beefman and The Stroker Morning Show’ – The Hard Times
Recession Hits Mushroom Kingdom With 100 Coins Now Only Buying .5-Ups – The Hard Drive
House Prices Now Higher Than Your Uncle Tony At A Stag In Amsterdam – Waterford Whispers News
Thanks for reading!