February 23, 2024: Google’s Woke AI Disaster

Cell phone records sink Fani Willis; Blinken reverses Pompeo doctrine; The Smirnov indictment makes no sense

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The Big Story

On Thursday, Google suspended image generation for its artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini after users discovered that the service was going to laughable lengths to avoid depicting white men. For instance, prompts to generate images of “a Viking,” a “17th-century scientist,” and “a 1943 German soldier” returned pictures with the demographic mix of Oberlin College circa 2023, plus some feathered headgear:

 When journalist Michael Tracey asked Gemini why it was disobeying his prompt for “representative images” of the Founding Fathers in 1789, Gemini informed him that it was for two main reasons, one of them being:

Historical Accuracy: While the term “Founding Fathers” traditionally refers to a group of white men who played significant roles in the American Revolution and the founding of the United States, it is important to acknowledge that the period of 1789 was not solely shaped by them. Many individuals from diverse backgrounds, including women, Native Americans, and African Americans, also contributed to the development of the nation, though their stories are often underrepresented. By including them in the images, I aimed to provide a more accurate and inclusive representation of the historical context.

It’s about historical accuracy, you see. 

As The Daily Wire’s Frank Fleming points out on X, however, the diversity mandate applied only to groups judged to be too “male, pale, and stale,” in the words of New York Attorney General Letitia James. Prompted to provide “diverse” illustrations of racially homogenous non-white groups such as “samurai” and “Zulu warriors,” Gemini simply ignored the prompt and depicted them all as Japanese or Zulu. Writing at Pirate Wires, Mike Solana explains the rules governing Gemini’s image generation:

[Gemini] must 1) reimagine every predominantly white contemporary environment as multi-racial and multi-ethnic, 2) reimagine every historically white environment as multi-racial and multi-ethnic, and 3) maintain traditionally non-white environments as exclusively populated by ‘proper races.’ 

As Brian Chau writes at his “From the New World” Substack, these results seem to be the product of intentional, human-driven ideological curation on the part of Google engineers, justified in the language of amorphous AI “safety” concerns and the avoidance of harm, including “representational harms” such as “stereotypes.” A Google research paper from earlier this year describes training Gemini to avoid “representational harms” by starting with a “harmful stereotype” and then constructing questions to “test whether models challenge or reinforce these stereotypes when answering questions.” An “accurate” answer challenges stereotypes—such as, for instance, the “stereotype” that the Vikings were European. 

While Google and others in the “AI safety” sphere have long sought to launder contestable ideological premises into baseline considerations of “fairness” and “harm avoidance,” Chau notes that here, there appears to have been some government involvement. The Google paper notes:

In 2023, we began working with a small set of independent external groups outside of Google to help identify areas for improvement in our model safety work… External groups were selected based on their expertise across a range of domain areas, including those outlined within the White House Commitments, the U.S. Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, and the Bletchley Declaration.

One of those “domain areas” is “societal risks,” which includes “representational and distributional harms.” But it’s a mistake to read this as the government “pushing” or “forcing” Google to do anything. As Hirsh Chitkara argued in Tablet last year, the “AI safety” discourse is essentially a con to promote mutually beneficial cooperation between powerful tech monopolies and the government:

With [OpenAI CEO Sam] Altman and his allies leading the dance, Silicon Valley can help write the rules of its own regulation in a way that lets both Washington and the tech industry claim they are “doing something” while further entrenching their own power. The national security state has already used the specter of AI disinformation to justify an escalation in their surveillance and censorship campaigns. Silicon Valley will be happy enough to play along, so long as it doesn’t impact bottom lines. More likely, the resultant regulations will effectively designate a handful of “responsible” purveyors of AI, guaranteeing an oligopoly for Microsoft (which owns a sizable portion of OpenAI), Amazon, and Google.

Plus, it’s not like Google needed any prodding. As social media went wild playing with Gemini over the past few days, users resurfaced old tweets from Gemini’s product lead, Jack Krawczyk, who apparently spent the Trump years in a state of supreme psychological agitation. In addition to posting the usual dreck you’d expect of a white progressive with a net worth in the tens of millions circa 2018 (“White privilege is fucking real. Don’t be an asshole and act guilty about it”), Krawczyk shared this post about voting in the 2020 election, which we feel is as reliable a guide as any to the character of the people responsible for shaping our new reality:

Disturbing stuff. 

Read Chau here:

Google Gemini’s Woke Catechism

 

And Chitkara here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/cyborgs-go-to-washington 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Gadi Taub explains how the U.S. push for a Palestinian state alienates Israelis and strengthens Netanyahu

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The Rest

→It’s not just Google, as Tablet’s Liel Leibovitz demonstrates in our Post of the Day: 

→As an Israeli negotiating team traveled to Paris for further hostage talks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released his plan for the postwar Gaza Strip. Although the plan was short on concrete details, it laid out a few main points, including:

• Gaza will be “completely demilitarized.” Israel will retain “security control over the entire area west of the Jordan,” and the IDF will “maintain operational freedom of action in the entire Gaza Strip, without a time limit.”

• The only arms allowed into Gaza will be those “required for maintaining public order,” which will be the responsibility of a domestic security force.

• Israel will establish a “buffer zone” between Israel and the Gaza Strip “for as long as there is a security need for it.”

• Gaza will be governed by a technocratic government of Palestinians “who are not identified with any country or entity that supports terrorism and receives payments from terrorists,” which would rule out the Palestinian Authority.

• There will be a “comprehensive de-radicalization program for all religious, educational and welfare institutions in the Gaza Strip,” financed and led by “countries acceptable to Israel.”

Read The Jerusalem Post’s report on the plan here: https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-788475 

→It’s all over for Fani Willis. In court filings and sworn testimony in last week’s disqualification hearing, Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, and her former boyfriend, Nathan Wade, both claimed that their romantic relationship began no earlier than March 2022, after Willis hired Wade in November 2021 as a special prosecutor in her RICO case against Donald Trump and several of his associates. Cell phone data included in a Friday motion from defense lawyers shows with near certainty that they were lying. Wade’s phone records show that between Jan. 1 and Nov. 30 of 2021, Wade visited the Hapeville neighborhood of Atlanta, where Fani Willis lived, at least 35 times. On at least two occasions, Wade arrived in Hapeville late at night and left early in the morning, with his phone remaining “stationary” in the vicinity of Willis’ condo for several hours. Wade testified last week that he visited her condo in Hapeville no more than 10 times in 2021, while both of them testified that he never spent the night in 2021. Finally, the data shows that Willis and Wade exchanged “over 2,000 voice calls and just under 12,000 text messages” during the same time period—which would seem excessive for a strictly platonic relationship.

For a refresher on the Fani Willis saga, see our Big Stories from Feb. 17 and Jan. 9. 

For a rundown of the revelations in today’s filing, read Techno Fog here:

New Cell Phone Records Prove DA Willis Affair

→Following news that Israel plans to build 3,000 housing units in West Bank settlements, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Friday that the United States views the expansion of settlements as “inconsistent with international law,” reversing the so-called Pompeo Doctrine, established in 2019, which regarded settlements as “not per se inconsistent with international law.” At a Friday press conference, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby confirmed the policy change: “We are simply reaffirming the fundamental conclusion that these settlements are inconsistent with international law. If there’s an administration that is being inconsistent, it was the previous one.”

→In yesterday’s Big Story, we briefly mentioned the Department of Justice’s recent indictment of FBI confidential human source Alexander Smirnov, who allegedly lied to the FBI about bribes paid to Joe and Hunter Biden after contact with “Russian intelligence officers.” Andy McCarthy, writing at National Review, thinks something is fishy about the whole indictment. He raises a few points.

First, according to the FBI, Smirnov was a previously reliable informant with a long history of cooperation with the bureau. And yet the FBI appears to have brought him in for a September 2023 interview intending to elicit false statements from him, without disclosing to him that they thought he was lying or giving him an opportunity to explain the discrepancies in his stories. As McCarthy writes:

In an ordinary case, the Justice Department and FBI do not want to convey the message “Cooperate with us, at high risk to yourself and your family, and we will eventually, and without warning, use what you’ve told us to make a case against you.” In fact, when FBI Director Chris Wray was resisting the GOP-controlled House demands that he provide them access to the 1023 form (the report of Smirnov’s interview), one of Wray’s main points was that publicizing the report would make it harder for the FBI to recruit informants.

Second, in its charging documents and subsequent court filings arguing against Smirnov’s release on bond, the DOJ gratuitously discloses Smirnov’s contacts with Russian intelligence, even though these were unrelated to the false statements charges and in fact had been reported by Smirnov to his FBI handlers. Here’s McCarthy again:

There is no good law-enforcement reason for these disclosures. They are extraneous to the false-statements charges. And from an intelligence perspective, the disclosures are exactly the kind of information that the FBI’s counterintelligence agents and the intelligence community habitually fight tooth and nail to prevent the Justice Department from disclosing in court submissions that are or may become public.

However, these disclosures would make sense if Special Counsel David Weiss—who inexplicably waited to charge Hunter Biden for tax crimes until the statute of limitations for crimes committed while his father was vice president had expired—were attempting to protect the Bidens by blaming Russian disinformation for the attention paid to the Bidens’ influence peddling. 

Finally, McCarthy notes, the indictment conceals Weiss’ own record of foot-dragging. As former U.S. attorney for Pittsburgh Scott Brady testified to the House in October, Brady and his team spent months throughout 2020 urging Weiss’ office to investigate Smirnov’s claims, on the basis that Smirnov had a track record of providing reliable information. They were met with stonewalling, with Brady at times having to ask his DOJ superiors to force Weiss to cooperate with his office. Brady’s team briefed Weiss on Smirnov in October 2020, and Weiss apparently did nothing about him until late August 2023, shortly after Hunter Biden’s plea deal with Weiss’ office imploded and House Republicans obtained Smirnov’s Form 1023 from the FBI. Then, after three years of nothing, Weiss swung into action—to charge Smirnov with lying on behalf of Russian intelligence. 

Read it here: https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/02/david-weisss-very-peculiar-smirnov-indictment-in-the-biden-case/ 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Will the Real ‘Hersh Rasseyner’ Please Stand Up?, by Curt Leviant

Reading Chaim Grade’s classic story and wondering who, exactly, the Yiddish master is arguing with

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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U.S. Scheming for a Palestinian State Unwittingly Strengthens Netanyahu

Overwhelming Israeli opposition to rewarding Palestinian terrorism with a state puts the prime minister's adversaries in a bind

By Gadi Taub

If the news that the U.S. is going to recognize a Palestinian state that doesn’t exist was intended to break up Prime Minister Netanyahu's wartime coalition, it's unlikely to work. Contrary to what the Biden administration assumes, the obstacle to the "two-state solution" is Israel's electorate, not its prime minister. The more the administration tries to ram this misguided plan down the throat of traumatized Israelis who are in no mood to compromise their security, the more the country’s prime minister will recover political support.

The calculation here is not a difficult one to make: Netanyahu’s coalition is united in the belief that promising the Palestinians a state in the middle of a war for national survival would be a declaration by Israel’s government that murdering, raping, and kidnapping Israelis is the way for Palestinians to achieve their national ambitions. Even the prime minister’s rivals in the coalition, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, have had to publicly support this consensus.

If this is not clear to the White House, it may be because the administration is clinging religiously to its failed “regional integration” policy—its appeasement of Iran—while relying on a uniformly leftist Israeli press that is eager to tell it what it wants to hear, about a nonexistent moderate electorate that will deliver a moderate two-statist coalition, if only Netanyahu can be removed from office.

One can imagine Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan calculating that by replacing Netanyahu with a leader who is willing to “courageously” agree to the two-state model, however far in the future it may be, the recent disasters of U.S. regional policy will turn out to look like a success: A new Palestinian proto-state backed by the U.S. would not only help to rescue Biden’s reelection prospects in Michigan, but also would prop up the administration’s Iran policy, forcing Israel to “de-escalate,” i.e., accommodate Iran's wishes. And then, a newly moderate Israel and a revitalized Palestinian Authority would be incorporated into the supposedly stabilizing mission of regional integration, as U.S. allies "learn to share the neighborhood" with Iran and its proxies. Remove Netanyahu, and all will be well.

If that's the plan, it’s a fantasy from start to finish.

From day one, Israel’s war against Hamas has threatened to discredit the Middle East strategy of three Democratic administrations. It was precisely this strategy, the appeasement and “integration” of Iran, that invited the war in Gaza in the first place and threatens to escalate armed conflict with Iran’s other regional assets—Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and IRGC-led militias in Syria and Iraq. Had the U.S. not paved the way for Iran's rising power and regional influence, Iran’s Palestinian proxy would have had neither the confidence nor the means to perpetrate the Oct. 7 massacre.

The longer the Gaza war continues, the greater the chance that it will bring down the failed “regional integration” policy. That is why from day one, the administration's policy has been to circumscribe the conflict, both geographically and politically. According to the White House, the Oct. 7 attack was just the latest chapter in the long history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not the Iranian-Israeli war that it really is. In support of this false framing is a false answer: The Israeli-Palestinian problem demands an Israeli-Palestinian solution.

Thus the Biden administration wants to force Israel to commit to an “irreversible path to a Palestinian state” on "the day after." This was supposed to split Netanyahu's governing coalition in the middle of a war. Because, the calculation goes, if the U.S. forces the issue now, Netanyahu will have to either acquiesce, and lose the right flank of his coalition (Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the rest of their parties), or else take a clear stand against it—giving the moderate flank of his coalition (i.e., Gantz, Eisenkot and their National Unity party) an excuse to exit.

The departure of Gantz and Eisenkot would not automatically topple the government, since the right-wing bloc still has a majority in the Knesset without National Unity. However, it could deprive the coalition of the broad consensus it needs to conduct the war, setting off a chain-reaction leading to elections, that would, the White House probably hopes, elevate Gantz to the premiership. A moderate with strong ties to the Washington establishment, Gantz would then help put things back on the “irreversible path to a Palestinian state," making the Middle East safe for regional integration again.

Israel's progressive press, along with polls that showed a decline in Netanyahu's approval after the war began and a corresponding rise in Gantz's popularity, likely created the impression of a moderate alternative waiting in the wings, requiring but a push from the Americans. Indeed, as minister of defense in the Lapid-Bennet coalition from 2020-2022, Gantz was known for enforcing strict limits on Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, while turning a blind eye to Palestinian illegal settlement in the same areas. He also attempted to revitalize Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2021 by hosting Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, at his home in Rosh Ha’ain. Since the war began, Gantz has refused to answer questions about whether he supports a Palestinian state—allowing him to signal to the left and to the White House that he remains on board without killing his chances for reelection, which depend on support from the center and the moderate right.

It was the U.S. push to recognize a Palestinian state, however, which forced Gantz to take a public stand against it, putting him shoulder-to-shoulder with Netanyahu. Recent polls explain why: 44% of Israelis say that their views have shifted to the right in the wake of Oct. 7. More than at any time in the past, American recognition of a Palestinian state would be seen by Israelis as categorically anti-Israel, a reward to Iran for its aggression, and a prize to the Palestinians for having massacred Jews. Rather than trap Netanyahu between Gantz and Smotrich, the Biden administration has trapped Gantz: If he publicly supports a Palestinian state, he will not survive politically to see it through. He therefore has had no other choice but to come out explicitly against it—along with everyone else in the cabinet.

Last Sunday, the cabinet voted unanimously for the following resolution:

1. Israel utterly rejects international diktats regarding a permanent settlement with the Palestinians. A settlement, if it is to be reached, will come about solely through direct negotiations between the parties, without preconditions.

2. Israel will continue to oppose unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state. Such recognition in the wake of the October 7th massacre would be a massive and unprecedented reward to terrorism and would prevent any future peace settlement.

Then on Wednesday, a huge majority of the Knesset (99 out of 120) affirmed the cabinet's position and voted in favor of a similar resolution, with only nine members opposing and the rest abstaining. Both votes are a clear indication of a mainstream consensus that, if it recognizes a Palestinian state, the U.S. would be throwing Israel under the bus.

No previous U.S. administration has contemplated recognition unless the Palestinians commit to end the conflict, partition the land, recognize the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their own nation-state, and sign a final accord of peace and normalization. Many Israelis were once willing to recognize a Palestinian state under these conditions. I was once among them. But the numbers declined after Yasser Arafat rejected a full and fair partition deal at Camp David in 2000, and the Second Intifada ensued.

Now, after Oct. 7, this constituency has almost disappeared. At this point, most Israelis would not accept partition even if the Palestinians made the commitments they have disdained to date. We learned this lesson the hard way: We can't afford to exchange land for promises which can easily be broken. We can't allow for even a remote possibility of a future terror state perched above our coastal plain, with less than 9 miles to travel before reaching the center of Tel Aviv. Trying to force a solution on Israel without any hope of peace will only cause more Israelis to believe that our erstwhile American ally has turned against us.

The harder the Biden administration presses its case, the more likely the result of the next election will make Netanyahu's “extremist right-wing coalition” look moderate by comparison. A more “extreme” and more determined coalition could well move to dismantle the Palestinian Authority and reclaim the West Bank before it hatches a much larger and more formidable terror state than the one we are now fighting in Gaza.