podcast friday

[sabotabby]

 I'm behind on my podcasts as usual but "AI Minstrel Shows" on It Could Happen Here aired a few days ago and was really good. Apparently there's a whole genre of AI video that I'd managed to avoid but should have guessed at. Racist buffoons on the internet now have the technology to generate completely fake Black people saying things that conform to white supremacists' ideology, which means that they can now do minstrel shows again. For free. Because AI content creators are the worst people imaginable so of course they have to do the worst things imaginable and this is one of them.

Bridget Todd does a great public service in not only making us aware of this shit but in tying it to historical uses of blackface and the ways in which punching-down "comedy" was used to create propaganda, enforce white supremacist institutional power, and transmit ideology. It's truly horrifying stuff and yet another reason to oppose the use of so-called AI in any creative space.

Comments

[altamira16]

I think it obviously flowed from "We can make this group of people look diverse by using AI instead of paying models who are Black."

[sabotabby]

YUP.

[grimjim]

AI-powered tokenism.

But thanks to the anti-DEI push, even that is likely to be dropped.

[ioplokon]

Worse, or perhaps differently bad, are the government and NG organizations that are using AI in place of consultations with different groups. It's the old joke about dissolving the public and selecting another...

[sabotabby]

This is what we lose by not teaching fiction anymore in schools. People lose the distinction between real and imaginary.

[grimjim]

Consulting with AI on diverse groups in an era when diversity itself is likely being deprioritized in AI training?

This is dystopian levels of laziness. They're not even selecting a public. They're accepting an AI hallucination of a public. Roleplay, not even LARP.

[minoanmiss]

I feel both informed and nauseated.

[sabotabby]

Agreed.

[greylock]

Well.... huh.
Trump had some AI images of 'urban' folk in his last campaign (I forget if they were official or not, but I'd be leaning yes), so the fact this sort of thing exists......

*points on tin foil hat*

.,... explains the footage of fake starving babies from Gaza.

We really are at the point where trusting what we see is over.

[sabotabby]

You jest but they are claiming exactly that.

[greylock]

I was only half jesting.
I kinda knew, without actually hearing them say it.

[kore]

And people wonder why I'm misanthropic. Holy Christ.

[sabotabby]

Right???

[rydra_wong]

Off-topic comment is off-topic: you may enjoy this review by someone else who hated Someone To Build A Nest In:

https://fffriday.dreamwidth.org/60783.html

[sabotabby]

Ahaha yes thank you for that. Particularly gratifying as I feel kind of acephobic when I trash ace-rep books, so it's good to hear from someone who's into it that it didn't work for them either.

[grimjim]

The technology is being sold as a way to unlock human potential, but the worst impulse is to recapitulate the past.

The cakewalk may very well have originated in mockery of the dances of the slaveowners, throwing shade up.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/23/256566647/the-extraordinary-story-of-why-a-cakewalk-wasnt-always-easy

[sabotabby]

Oh wow, I had no idea.