Degenerated

A connection of mine made a post on LinkedIn about the use of generative automation in the gaming industry, and how that's become basically cover for bad management.

Someone who saw the post took offense, not at the post itself, or its theme, but at the fact that it struck them as having been artificially generated. (I decided to drop the text into a few "GPT Detector" sites, by the way, and even my favorite false positive generator came back with a "0% GPT" score.)

Pointing out the patterns in writing that one believes that LLMs have been trained (intentionally or not) to favor is a different task than pointing out patterns in writing that are unique to LLMs. I think that there is a tendency to become caught up in the idea of "the flaw of averages," the idea that the "average" of a group of people, even a large group, won't actually match any given individual in that group. Applied to detecting LLMs and GPT-created text, it presumes that some artifacts of the training data that come out in generated text are unique to generated text; observe enough people and you'll see something like a given phrasing or sentence structure come out of the data, but the precise phrasing or structure exist nowhere in the data.

Which is reasonable, but to actually validate that for any given piece of text, one would need an in-depth understanding of the training data. To claim, for instance, that only generative automation uses emojis to mark bulleted lists is to make a pretty sweeping claim about quite a lot of human social media posting; one that's effectively impossible to empirically support. And I have it on pretty good authority that ChatGPT didn't invent the m-dash.

Big picture, I understand the feeling that generative automation is equivalent to "low-effort." I've seen my share of generated artwork, and come away with the impression that the person felt a need to have some sort of illustration, but not anything worth investing significant time, effort or money into, and so it felt perfunctory... the Social Media Gods say that text with pictures gets more Engagement, so here's a picture: please Engage now.

But I'm not sure that angry call-outs do anything productive. (Not that there's anything wrong with simply venting on the Internet, mind you.) People can snipe at one another for a supposed unwillingness to treat online posting with the respect that it deserves, but in the end, that sort of feeds the very Engagement beast that sits at the heart of the problem. And because spending the time to write posts oneself is the norm, there's little drive to step up and comment on that fact. It's not much different from the reasons why rage-bait outperforms more positive postings: the "Must. Denounce. Now." impulse feeds into the incentive structure of social media more broadly. (Which, of course, makes them an attractive mode on online interaction themselves.)

What makes things on social media go away isn't vitriol, it's apathy. (Another sentence structure supposedly coined by LLMs, by the way.)

It's likely overstating things to claim that the use of generative automation in social media is reaching the level of a moral panic, but I suspect that the number of people who feel actively slighted by it is growing. And sensitivity to slights can produce the perverse habit of seeking them out, in order to respond to them. Which, in turn, can lead to one's slight detector is perfectly calibrated.

For my part, I've come to realize that I don't naturally analyze text for signs of automation. I think that I'm okay with lacking the skill to do so; I'm unconvinced that learning to do it well enough to be accurate is time well spent.

Mirror Image

The question that the widespread adoption of generative automation by business will raise is not "What will be the effects on productivity?" Rather, I think it will be, "What will be the effects on demand, especially demand for human labor?" I can imagine a worst-case scenario in which automation, especially autonomous automation, creates a world in which access to raw materials becomes paramount. If doesn't matter, for instance, if people own a robot that can cook for them if they have nothing of value to trade for food.

I suspect, as with so many other things, that these sorts of problems will not crop up unexpectedly so much as it will turn out that people were expecting "someone else" to take care of the problem, preferably in a manner that wouldn't cost them anything. And when it turns out that "someone else" was actually "no one else," emergency measures, none of them really to anyone's liking, will wind up being enacted.

What strikes me as a slowly building panic over the disruptions to the job market in the technology sector, both current and expected in the future, speaks to this. While it's not hard to find techno-optimists who will loudly proclaim that "genuine human interaction" will suddenly become highly valuable in a highly automated society, they tend to be short on explanations as to how a large segment of the current workforce will come to be employed this way. And the people who see not only their jobs going away, but their future prospects for supporting themselves, remain unconvinced.

Cultivating new lines of work that would be expensive to impossible for even genuine "artificial general intelligence" to carry out would seem to be a priority, but such cultivation will, in the short term at least, be unprofitable... which is why no-one's currently turning their resources to it; the expected return on that investment is pretty much non-existent. And while there are people who will look to government to solve the problem, the resources are going to have to come from somewhere, and decades of nurturing a distrust of government efficacy and a dislike of taxation are likely to result in quite a bit of time spent in looking for someone to extract the resources from who have resources to take, yet lack the political voice to block their taking.

In the end, finding a social solution has to be more important to the majority of people than searching for personal ones. But stereotypical American individualism, to say nothing of social division, actively works against that. The saying that "Whenever you say, 'Someone should do something,' remember that Someone stands in front of you whenever you look in the mirror," applies here as much as to anything else, however. And if I don't think that "someone else" will start working on the problem, perhaps I should start educating myself on what that work entails.

Grimelight

Perhaps the real problem with the video, shared by President Trump on his Truth Social account, that portrayed Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, is that it triggered calls for its removal, rather than an examination of why it was posted. I don't believe for a moment that President Trump allowed some anonymous staffer to post the video to his account without anyone knowing what was in the entire video. The President's previous comments about Africa and the African diaspora have made no secret of his disdain. Which is nothing new... I suspect it would be silly of me to say that Donald Trump is the only racist to have occupied the White House during my lifetime.

The idea that there are members of the MAGA movement who are simply unreconstructed racists is simply taken as given by many. But, okay... the United States has had its share, if not more of unreconstructed racists for as long as I've been around, too... but the White House giving an implicit stamp of approval to such messaging seems unique to the Trump Administration, at least in modern times.

Even if we accept (and I don't) the idea that the video was posted to the social media account of the President of the United States without anyone vetting it thoroughly for its message, the fact that it originated with a meme account points to it being a form of "red meat" for the President's base of voters. And that raises the question, at least for me, of why memes? Of all of the things that the President's Truth Social account could be sharing, why bother with random stuff like this; especially if it's going to be hand-waved through? One would think the last thing the White House wants is for some random message to be seen coming from the President. Donald Trump has pretty much zero in the way of "regular guy" credentials, so why engage in the bored teenager act?

When I was in high school, I knew a number of people who had no compunctions against calling me "nigger" to my face. Most of them didn't strike me as racists, and I concluded that it wasn't racist, but personal. They were seeking to get a rise out of me. And I suspect that this is what's at work here. The President is like a class clown who craves the spotlight badly enough to do whatever he can to keep it trained on themselves.

The thimble thunderstorm of the video spread internationally pretty quickly, and generated a lot of heat, even if there was little light. I'm not in the camp that says the President is attempting to distract people from other things... the news cycle can present multiple things to the public at once. Donald Trump simply needs for one of those things to be him.

Democrats were, of course, going to take the bait on this one; their political incentives demand that they constantly decry this or that random bit of inanity that the President's engaged in, even if the smart move would be to simply roll their eyes and find something more constructive to do with their time. But enough people demand constant vigilance, and responsiveness, that they're force to play ball, and keep themselves in the spotlight as well. And this time, even a few Republicans felt the need to get in on the act, despite the fact that it has likely earned them the moniker RINO from the MAGA faithful. But it ensured that reporters would be rushing to get comment from the press secretary and the President himself, both of whom said pretty much the same things they say every other time.

The constituency for this is hard to pin down, because it seems that so many people are on the lookout for, and responsive to, signs that President Trump is doing something; even when that something is not governing. Elements of the political Left and Right alike seem to have little better to do than to boo or cheer the President, who responds with a constant stream of random acts for them to respond to. But what I don't understand is why these groups must never be allowed to go hungry. Why does Congress and the news media dutifully play the same tired role, over and over again. What does the outrage machine offer in return, that the rest of the public cannot match? 

Generation Narrow

I was watching YouTube over dinner, and "the algorithm" suggested "Psychology of Gen X." Being a member of "Generation X" myself, I decided I'd have a watch, and see if I recognized anything of myself. I'm of the opinion that age cohort, as the informal groupings known as "The Baby Boomers," "Generation Z" et cetera are known have become the new Zodiac; clustering broad swaths of the population together and assigning them a pithy list of traits seen as so universal that all members of the group may as well be the same person, just with different haircuts and outfits.

What made "Psychology of Gen X" slightly different than the other profiles that I've come across now and again was that it didn't simply list random traits... it attempted to explain them. It was all very surface-level; the video is, after all, only eight minutes long, and so there wasn't much room for specifics.

But even with that, I quickly realized that the video was really seeking to explain the White, middle-class, urban/suburbanites that I grew up around. Very little of the video seemed relevant to the lives of my cousins who lived in the poorer neighborhoods of Chicago. It was taking the kids from Stranger Things and extrapolating out from them to all of the millions of people born in a 15-year period.

And realizing that gave me a bit of insight into the Trumpist/Make America Great Again movement: of course they see themselves as the legitimate Americans, they see themselves in the broad generalizations that people make about the United States. Sure, Psychology of Gen X did as much to leave out rural Americans from Appalachia as it did Native Americans, but its viewpoint was very much White and male, and there was no indication that it even understood that other people existed, let alone had something worth mentioning to contribute to the experience of being "Generation X." (And that leaves aside the fact that the age cohorts are often taken as worldwide phenomena.)

Part of it seemed to stem from the fact that it was short, and the fact that the channels seems based in the United Kingdom could also play a part, but a lot of just seemed perfunctory. If you've seen one video claiming to explain the psychology of a given age cohort, you've seen them all, and this one was no exception. The stills that played in the background to illustrate the narration were of the bland, generative automation-created style that's come to typify artwork that needs to be done, as opposed to illustration that really adds to the experience.

And a quickly-made, short video about a group of people is going to focus on the mainstream, because that's what there's time to do. And this wasn't a video for Gen X, to lay out the breadth of the cohort... It's a video for today's young people, to offer an easily digestible explanation of their parents, and other older people they encounter at work and in other aspects of their lives. The fact that it only deals with a minority of the overall group would be lost on many of them.

Not that I expect that the target audience would be fooled into thinking they had the complete picture. They likely understand as well as anyone else the difficulties of cramming decades of people's lived experiences into 8 minutes. But it's one thing to understand that one is seeing snippets of the lives of a certain group versus seeing a slice of nearly everyone's lives. That important distinction struck me as missing, and when it did, I realized how many other times it hadn't been made.

While much has been made of the fact that so much of American history is focused on the White middle and upper classes, I'm not convinced that the idea that this means there should be a greater focus on other people has really sunk in. I doubt that the person or people behind this particular Psychology Simplified channel set out to ignore the lived experiences of most of Gen X. When one's making short videos on an every-other-day basis, there likely isn't a lot of time for deep research without a fairly extensive team; and while the video does cite references, there aren't a lot of them, and nothing about any cultural differences in the experience. (Okay, granted, I don't often have a lot of citations here, but Nobody In Particular is intended to be about the United States as I experience it, personally.) So it's understandable that for someone like me, who lived through the time period in question, a lot would seem to be missing. But there are people for whom the narrow focus reinforces an understanding of themselves as the center of the world.

Panic Button

Participant homophobia was found to be the driving force behind their willingness to accept the gay panic defense as legitimate. Higher levels of homophobia and religious fundamentalism were found to predict more leniency in verdict decisions when the gay panic defense was presented. This study furthers the understanding of decision making in cases involving the gay panic defense and highlights the need for more research to be conducted to help understand and combat LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) prejudice in the courtroom.
When Is "Gay Panic" Accepted? Exploring Juror Characteristics and Case Type as Predictors of a Successful Gay Panic Defense

There is, of course, no "straight panic" defense that attorneys generally deploy when seeking to defend people against charges of violence. Because one suspects that it would be open season on stalkers, jackasses and abusers if juries could be counted on to decide that women being targeted, being bothered "over and over and over again" and having unwanted sexual advances made to them justified killing their tormentors.

But given the fact that homophobia and religious fundamentalism are positive predictors of leniency in such cases, it's not surprising... In such circles, the crime is treating a man as one would a woman, rather than a lack of respect for other people as a whole. I would guess that women have to find it extremely frustrating, understanding that there are people who feel that the sort of behavior that many of them put up with on a regular basis justifies violence based on sexual orientation, and that lawyers are willing to play on that in order to help their clients; and that with the right juries, it works. If straight men have a right to expect gay men to take "no" for an answer, why don't women have a right to expect the same from gay men?

The "obvious" answer is that sexually-aggressive straight men are a norm, and sometimes, an expectation. A perhaps less-obvious answer is the overall fragility of many standards of masculinity. If men are so tough, and so able to withstand hardship, why are they given a pass in this way? Simply because having a gay man come on to them risks their self-image as men?

But I guess it's easy for me to say... I'm not staring down the barrel of life in prison because someone threatened my sense of myself as a man, and I responded with lethal violence. Were never setting foot outside of a prison again a real possibility, maybe I'd be all in favor of my lawyers looking to use the jury's deep-seated prejudices in my favor. I like to think that I'd be adult enough to own up to what I'd done, though.

Not that I can see myself doing it. And I guess that's the paradox that rubs at me. I'm not "man enough" to want to kill someone for making an unwanted pass at me, and that's what allows me to be "man enough" to not want to use unjustified prejudices to bail me out. Maybe that's not the correct framing of the issue at hand. Maybe linking those two things, expecting that a masculinity that permits the use of violence over relative trivialities should also demand taking ownership of one's actions (or loss of self-control) is simply playing into a different set of prejudices; one that's just as limiting and unjustified?

Masculinity is a box, one that many segments of American society have decreed that men shall not leave. I don't find it terribly stifling, because I'm not really at all motivated to move any farther from the center of the box than I already am. But I'm also not in a place in that box that compels me to need to defend the actions I take (or don't take) to maintain that place. My tendency towards crankiness prevents me from having much sympathy for those who do, and maybe that makes me part of the problem, as well.