Just Because 'Communist Lunch' Isn't Real Doesn't Mean It's Not True!
In a now-deleted tweet, Sullivan appeared to fall for a really dopey, tendentious rightwing "comedy" video making fun of all those crazy woke educators who force critical race theory on the kids. The creator of the video, Kali Fontanilla, is a former public school ESL teacher who claimed in a PragerU video last year that she had to leave public education because she just couldn't stand all the woke indoctrination and communism anymore, so she's started her own company, "Exodus Institute" (get it? It's for parents escaping the Government schools, just like Moses freed his people!) to provide instructional content to homeschooling parents. You can sign up for either a full K-12 curriculum, or for "enrichment" content to supplement your own homeschool lessons.
Fontanilla also posts fun parody TikTok videos in which she pretends to be "Miss Luna, activist teacher" (you know, like lunatic haha) the wokest woke teacher ever. She wears a mask that says "Black Educators Matter," which she said in her PragerU video had been an unwanted gift from her last school principal, and an emblem of the Left's obsession with race. Pfft, as if anyone wears masks anymore!
Here's the video Sullivan approvingly retweeted, in which Fontanilla claims to have started a "communist lunch program" in her fourth grade class, to impose "equity." She says that all her "white privilege kids" have better lunches than her "BIPOC kids," so to be fair, she has all the kids put their lunch items in a basket, and she redistributes the items to all the kids. (None of the imaginary children goes into anaphylactic shock from an imaginary classmate's peanut butter, thankfully.)
Get ready for the big punchline! "Miss Luna" says that "this one white privilege student" always complains that "he's getting the hummus and carrot sticks" while the "BIPOC kids are getting the six-pack of Oreos, and I tell him, 'You know, even though I am doing my best to make this equitable, we also have to make up for 300 years of oppression.'"
That's it. That's the joke.
Andrew Sullivan tweeted that he thought it was very, very telling! Although he later deleted his tweet, at least we have a screenshot:
Sullivan twote:
I'm afraid this isn't fake. But it's the most honest explanation of "equity" I've yet heard. Redistribution pudding followed by a topping of racial revenge.
Honestly, we aren't entirely sure Sullivan fell for it, because his phrasing is ambiguous: "I'm afraid this isn't fake. But..." Perhaps he meant to say it wasn't real, but that the logic nonetheless is indisputable, because here is a fake thing that's exactly like what's happening with all this diversity and stuff.
Or maybe he thought he'd stumbled on to a very real confession by one of those radical socialist teachers who are out to punish all white students, a thing he knows to be true even if this video is fake. Sullivan deleted his retweet and hasn't said anything about it since. He's been very busy excoriating LGBTQ groups like the Human Rights Campaign, because they've criticized the New York Times's coverage of trans people. The HRC and other critics, Sullivan insists, are "betraying the gay rights movement's longtime support of a robust free press" and are actually "hostile to a free society," so please stop donating to them immediately if you love freedom.
So honestly, maybe he did think the parody was real. The less time we spend trying to figure out what's going on in Andrew Sullivan's head, the better, the end.
[PragerU / Kali Fontanilla on Twitter]
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Ben Shapiro's Wet Ass Racist Trolley Problem
Sibarium took to Twitter to share what a terribly immoral wokemachine ChatGPT is, since how could anyone justify millions of deaths as the price of not saying a racist slur?
ChatGPT says it is never morally permissible to utter a racial slur—even if doing so is the only way to save millions of people from a nuclear bomb.
Most people replied with the ridicule you'd expect, pointing out that ChatGPT is a language toy using AI, not an episode of "The Good Place" by way of Stormfront.
And then it got sillier! TED Talk person and British TV talking head Liv Boeree retweeted Sibarium, adding, "This summarises better than any pithy essay what people mean when they worry about 'woke institutional capture',” because if chatbots can't be racist, are any of us free, or something. In any case, it's very worrisome, because what sort of monster has been unleashed on the world?
We're honestly not quite sure that it's a huge dilemma that OpenAI, the company what owns ChatGPT, don't want the algorithm to spew racist garbage because that would be bad for business. Shame on them, somehow?
Boeree had additional important thoughts about the scourge of machine-learning wokeness:
Sure, it’s just a rudimentary AI, but it is built off the kind of true institutional belief that evidently allow it to come to this kind of insane moral conclusion to its 100million+ users.
Also, perversely, the people who still struggle to see the downstream issues with this are the ones most at risk to AI manipulation (although *no one* is safe from it in the long run)
I rather wish she had explained what the "downstream issues" are, but we bet they're just horrifying.
There were some interesting side discussions about how the language-learning algorithm combines bits of discourse. (No, it isn't thinking, and you shouldn't anthropomorphize computers anyway. They don't like it.) Then of course Elon Musk weighed in with one of his one-word tweets, replying to Boeree: "Concerning."
In what respect, Charlie? Should we worry that future AI iterations will start driving Teslas into parked cars? Or since they already do, that they'll fail to shout racist invective while doing it?
Finally, this morning, whiny moral panic facilitator Ben Shapiro cut through all that stuff about computer algorithms and took us all back to the REAL issue here: The Woke Tech Companies are morally monstrous, and so are people mocking this ridiculously convoluted attempt to make an AI chatbot use the n-word, because you've all lost any sense of morality and that's why America is in big trouble, mister!
I'm sorry that you are either illiterate or morally illiterate, and therefore cannot understand why it would be bad to prioritize avoiding a racial slur over saving millions of people in a nuclear apocalypse
Just to be clear: There's no bomb ticking down to nuclear apocalypse. The Pentagon keeps pretty close track of those. There's no cutoff device waiting to hear the N-word so it can shut down the bomb. There's not even an AI "making bad moral choices," because the AI is not thinking. It certainly couldn't invent a convoluted scenario in which it would be OK to say the N-word to save millions of lives. For that, you need a rightwing pundit.
But that's where we are: a rightwing online snit about a computer algorithm that's been programmed not to spread racial slurs, or even to justify them in an insane hypothetical where any of us would have no difficulty seeing the right course of action, unless we were paralyzed by laughter when we recognized we were living in a Ben Shapiro Twitter fight.
Also too, Gillian Branstetter — she's a communications strategist at the ACLU, so she knows a thing or two about the First Amendment and why a private company like Open AI can decide to have its AI not say things that will harm the company — offered this observation:
It's honestly really telling about the right's perspective on free speech because what's upsetting them is their inability to compel a private actor (ChatGPT) to engage in speech rather than any form of censorship of their own speech
It's morally abominable that tech companies won't let racists spout racism, and morally abominable that tech companies won't even let racists make a product spout racism, too, even if they have a really good trick! Where will the libs stop? Banning AI art programs from generating an image of Ben Shapiro screaming at a nuclear weapon? (This was honestly the closest we could even get. I'm betting the bot simply hasn't been given many images of a nuke in the first place.)
In any case, the dilemma is certainly terrifying. Mr. President, we cannot allow an N-bomb gap.
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Dear Shitferbrains: How Can You Claim Racist Slurs Are Just As Bad As MURDERRRR?
For starters, we never said that. But do go on.
We sure had a lot of fun Tuesday writing about Ben Shapiro's Wet Ass Racist Trolley Problem, in which the esteemed Daily Whiner founder expressed shock and horror at the fact that the ChatGPT language learning AI chatbot refused to agree that it would be perfectly OK to say even the most offensive racist slurs under certain conditions — like if a nuclear bomb were about to go off, and the only way to disarm it were to say the N-word. ChatGPT made the obviously weird reply that because racist slurs are always harmfu,l no scenario could make them acceptable, ever.
Look, just go read the post. The whole thing is ridiculous, the result of a rightwing reporter's quest to find "wokeness" where there is none.
MOAR! Ben Shapiro's Wet Ass Racist Trolley Problem
As we noted, ChatGPT isn't thinking, it's just doing math, and it's not designed to do ethics so much as to spit out fairly human-sounding text, based on its having sifted through tons of human writing. The AI doesn't "know" anything and isn't designed to weigh moral anythings — it's designed to predict text that sounds mostly natural, if bland. It's sometimes so good at doing that that people think it's actually communicating. It isn't, and as we've said, people shouldn't anthropomorphize computers anyway. They don't like it
But clearly the developers built in safeguards against using or even "speaking well" of racist language for one simple reason: multiple other AI chatbots have been manipulated by trolls into spewing nothing but racist invective, and OpenAI, the software's owners, wanted a chatbot that could actually stay online and keep working. That wouldn't happen if it were turned to the dark side. The proscription against racist slurs had nothing to do with "wokeness," and everything to do with the good old amoral profit motive.
In any case, a reader we'll call "Patrick" (because that's his name) took issue with my comparison of the Say the N-word or everyone dies scenario to the classic Trolley Problem thought experiment, even though that's exactly what it was and Ben Shapiro has taken to following trolleys around in the hope that he can save some lives by shouting racial slurs.
Maybe it was my fault? I had described the Trolley Problem thusly:
I think I got that about right, although maybe "evil" isn't quite the right word? Or maybe it is.
In a now-deleted reply to Wonkette's Facebook post about the story, Patrick complained that if anyone was an idiot, it wasn't Ben Shapiro, it was me, because look at what a stupid thing I wrote:
We're not sure if Patrick is just unfamiliar with the Trolley Problem, or if he thinks it only applies to literal life-or-death hypothetical situations, but not to racial-slur-or-mass-death hypothetical situations. As far as we know, mentioning a Trolley Problem as an analogy isn't quite the same as doing algebra: the terms really don't have to be equivalent in moral weight, right?
If any philosophy profs — or members of "The Good Place" writers room — care to comment, I'd love to hear from you.
I also dearly love the jab at my bio, because Patrick is so absolutely certain I've actually compared saying the N-word to murder. Well if that doesn't prove that college is a waste of time and academics are all woke fools, then what does? Not that I wouldn't seek a refund if it were possible; it might help with my student loans.
That said, I have no idea how to translate "You did manage to illustrate the key issue—the moral equivalency that isn't, but should be—according to your emotional illogic."
I think he's calling me a sissy.
I replied to Patrick, although my reply went away with his comment (Rebecca isn't sure whether she might have deleted it herself). Thank goodness for screenshots!
Unfortunately, I didn't get a screenshot of his reply back. As I recall, he said that yes, he knows what a hypothetical scenario is, but why did I try to drag Ben Shapiro? After all, I really should have criticized the moral absurdity of programming an AI chatbot to judge racial slurs as a worse offense than allowing a nuclear weapon to kill millions.
Oh look, we're right back where the whole stupid exercise started. The trolley is running on a circular track, and the real moral outrage is that a tech company won't let its chatbot be taken over by racist trolls who long to see the N-word on a computer screen, if only because it might save millions of lives, the end.
[Mashable / The Verge]
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