Missed a Spot

This article in The Washington Post, What AI thinks a beautiful woman looks like. is emblematic of much of the debate around the potential social impacts of generative automation tools, and how they, by constantly regurgitating broader social biases, can be instruments of perpetuating those same biases.

But something stood out for me when looking at the procedurally generated portraits that had resulted from the authors' prompts.

Several of the prompts started with the phrase "A full length portrait photo." This is a fairly standard term, and it refers to a photo that is, well, full length. The subject's entire body is in the frame, with no part of the head or feet cut off or cropped. Many of the images shown don't meet that criteria. While it's certainly possible the The Washington Post cropped the images for best effect, many of the ones presented are full length, so it seems odd that the Post would have needed to crop only select images for clarity.

And that raises something of a dilemma. If the Post cropped images that were full length when first generated, how do we understand that we're seeing what was given to the reporters? There's no indication in the article that any alterations have been made, so it can be difficult to say what may or may not have been changed about them. But if images aren't cropped, then it's pretty clear that these tools are still having difficulty with the "follow basic instructions" part of generating images. In that light, a lack of diversity in skin tones, age and body type in the images generated may not be the biggest problem that needs dealing with.

And this goes back to my current knock on calling these systems "artificial intelligence."

Given the size of these datasets, makers of generative systems are not going to be able to go in and make sure that all of the images are captioned or tagged in ways that will work for everyone. It would simply be too time consuming and two expensive. And so this could simply be a case of "garbage in, garbage out." And if it strikes one that current standards of beauty are garbage, perhaps the results stand to reason.

Convinced

Last year, I was in Mississippi, to visit family. It was an interesting place. I don't go down there very often, and in the past it had always been for funerals, so I was never there long. This last trip, I had some time to spend, and so in addition to meeting with family, I had the opportunity to meet some of the neighbors.

One of the neighbors was an older White lady, very nice, and quite talkative in the way that people can be when they meet someone new to them. As part of out very wide-ranging discussion, she informed me that the area was changing, in part due to the number of immigrants to the area. Having come down from the Seattle area, the place struck me as being nearly immigrant-free; I think I could count the ones I met on my fingers. But a jump from two to four is often more noticeable than going from ten to twelve, so I understood how the low baseline number made even the modest increase seem large by comparison. One of the things that the neighbor told me about the influx of people was that they were purchasing small businesses. My mother, who spends much more time down that way than I do, had told me about South Asians buying a couple of local businesses from owners who were retiring. Again, I didn't think anything of it at first; immigrant-owned small businesses are fairly thick on the ground in the Puget Sound area.

The interesting piece of the conversation came when the neighbor told me that the new arrivals had purchased their businesses with grant money given to them by the federal government, as a means of helping them to displace the locals. No evidence of this was offered; instead, it was described as "obvious" to anyone who understood anything about the area.

One of the things about conspiracies is that they can offer straightforward answers to questions without requiring a lot of background knowledge of the topic. And in this case, it freed the neighbor from needing to understand the economics of migration, overall. While there are a number of people who cross the border between the United States and Mexico because they're poor, and looking for better work than they can get at home (and sometimes, work period), immigrants from many other parts of the world are fairly well-off. After all, they needed to be able to afford intercontinental air fare. And given that many of them are locked out of the domestic market for the skilled jobs they held in their home countries, buying and running a small business was one of the better options available to them. Attempting to explain this to the neighbor, however, was something of a lost cause, mainly, I suspect, because her original story not only made sense to her, but it allowed the circumstances around her to make sense to her. So I didn't push very hard; there would have been no real benefit in winning.

Still, I felt badly for her. I know a good number of people who have a distrust of government, and for some, it's a very frightening state in which to live, constantly suspecting that "the people in charge" have it in for them. They strike me as some of the people that the Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025" is designed to appeal to; the sort who see agents of the government as nefarious.

Given the fact that egosyntonic stories about the world aren't going anywhere, there may not be much to be done about things like this. Which is unfortunate, because the fear and worry that underlie many of these ideas is a burden that weighs down people who are already laboring under the weight of having few options to advance themselves..

Whatever

Whatever happened, I wondered, to Connie Sun? After I'd heard about her comics blog from NPR, I followed it for a while, then would drop in now and again, and eventually some time had gone by since I'd last read it. I dropped in, and found that the most recent post was more than a year old.

It is, in a way, the curse of the Internet. It's remarkable easy to feed more interests than one can reasonably keep up with, and so it's inevitable that some, if not many of them are going to fall by the wayside, until something reminds one of them. By which point, the thing in question may no longer exist.

I understand, intellectually, that the internet is ephemeral. In the end, it's all just links to digital media, and digital media is ephemeral in a way that other things are not. I have a few books in my home that are older than I am. And while those books may be out of print, the books themselves are still there. They are physical objects, and that lends them a durability (nothing in genuinely permanent) that seems to be lacking from computer files.

The tenuous connections and pseudo-connections facilitated by the Internet are just as ephemeral, but at least to me, they also tend to lend the people themselves that same quality. I'm petty sure that Ms. (or maybe she's become Mrs. in the meantime) Sun is still doing her thing, and still being a perceptive observer of the world, her place in it, and how she and it interact as she moves through it. But I don't actually know Ms. Sun; I simply followed her cartoons from literally the other side of the continent. At that remove, I can't even prove that she's a real person; it could have been a pseudonym, for all that I know. And in that sense, the lack of updates to her blog are no different than if she'd been deleted by someone who decided that they no longer needed to maintain that identity.

I've "met" a lot of people on the Internet who have effectively ceased to exist in the same  way. I suspect that they're still out there, but with the digital connection between us broken, it's like they were never really there at all. Kind of like losing a telephone number or an address back in the day,

And so I wonder. Are there people out there for whom I am simply another ghost in the network of machines? A person who wandered in out of the digital ether, touched their lives briefly and then disappeared again?

Out Loud

There is a saying in American politics that a gaffe is when a politician (or a candidate for political office) says what they actually think. There's something telling in that, not about politicians, but about the public, and its need to have the political class see them in a particular way.

With the flap over Senator J. D. Vance's "childless cat ladies" comment yet to die down completely, I decided to take a look back at the big comments that have come out of other recent presidential campaigns, and see how it compares. In 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama made his "guns and religion" comment that people saw as insulting to rural Americans. In 2012, Mitt Romney's "makers and takers" comments, secretly recorded at a fundraiser, were taken as disdain for nearly half of the country. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton caused an uproar with her "basket of deplorables" remarks.

What I found interesting about Mr. Obama's and Mrs. Clinton's remarks is that the focus was on one specific phrase in their remarks; "they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them" and "you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it," but their broader context was about empathy. Mr. Obama was making the point that these were people who had been left behind by policies of previous administrations. And while it was the Clinton campaign that slammed then-Senator Obama for his comments, when Hillary Clinton effectively made the same point in 2016, she was noting that the other half of Trump's base felt let down and abandoned, and were desperate for change. In effect, each of them were calling upon the American Left to see past its visceral dislike of Right-leaning voters, and understand that they had problems that needed to be solved, as well.

When Mitt Romney made his comments, we wasn't speaking to the public, but to wealthy donors, and as a result, his comments lack the call for understanding and compassion that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton had been making. He was speaking to a group of people unlike the people he was speaking about, and, as a result, his remarks came across as much more disdainful. In part. I suspect, because he was laying out reasons why his candidacy wasn't more popular than it was. Apparently, "hey, I'm running against a popular incumbent, and things are going well under his watch," wasn't going to be good enough to mollify them.

Likewise, J. D. Vance was speaking to Tucker Carlson, and the Fox News audience. While this was a public forum, Mr. Vance likely understood that the audience for Mr. Carlson's show was highly partisan. And, at least for a time, he was right. It took Hillary Clinton surfacing his remarks for them to become newsworthy. Mr. Vance was speaking to a partisan audience, in a venue that was all about negative partisanship. Like Mitt Romney, he was speaking to people who expected him to be hostile to, and critical of, opposing partisans.

What makes all of this interesting is this interplay between the audience and their partisanship. Hillary Clinton was also addressing one of the unspoken realities of politics; that "deplorable" or not, people are allowed to vote, and their votes can be the difference between winning, and having a chance a favorable policies, and losing. Democratic politicians have a challenge in speaking to their supporters about Republican voters, because while rank-and-file Democrats may be angry at them, the broader Democratic message is that government can work for people. And that includes people who are angry, even perhaps unreasonably so, that it hasn't worked them in the past.

Republicanism, at least as I have experienced it, makes no such concession, being much more comfortable with the idea that the conservative ideals it espouses (or simply pays lip service to) are self-evidently the Right Way To Do Things, and opposition to them is often born of deliberate perversity and bad faith. But that's not a good public-facing message, hence why the statements that landed Messrs. Romney and Vance in the public hotseat weren't made on the stump, but to friendly audiences.

And maybe that makes it worse. Sure, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton said unflattering things about Republicans, but they said it to their faces, as it were. Mitt Romney and J. D. Vance were speaking about Democrats, but not in venues where they expected Democrats to be listening.

Top Down

The reason why people turn a blind eye to it is that Thailand is, of course, an incredible economic success story. And this was part of the story with Bangladesh. Its economy was growing so fast that people turned a blind eye to the authoritarian government. Thailand is far, far, wealthier... I mean, it's a pretty poor country, when I first went there in the early 80s. It's now a proper upper-middle income country and, you know, an economic miracle. And this is one of the problems, that the link between being a liberal democracy and delivering growth, which, it was this sort of story for 200 years, has been broken. And increasingly from China to Thailand, people are looking at these more authoritarian models and saying, "Well, we don't really mind as long as we're getting wealthier."
Rory Stewart. "Iran’s Imminent Retaliation & Is The Press Softer On Labour?" The Rest Is Politics Podcast. Thursday, 15 August, 2024.

In other words, if it's not broken, why fix it? For supporters of liberal democracy, and other representative forms of government, autocracy is broken by definition. And they'll point to places such as Venezuela and the like to make their point. But in China, Thailand and other similar places, the fact that the government is autocratic, or even totalitarian hasn't resulted in obvious mismanagement of the place. And so widespread resistance to the regime isn't present, because most people don't see the need to change the government to better their material conditions. And people will put up with a lot if it means raising their standards of living.

Liberal democracy is a means, not an end. If it's going to persist, it has to delivery what the populace demands of it. Increased standards of living may be what people are after, but things like national pride have also pushed people to suffer, if not embrace, governments that appear to be disasters from the outside. This, of course, is true of almost any government, but the individual freedoms that many liberal democracies provide mean that they can, intentionally or not, vote themselves out of existence if they are not careful.

And presuming that support for representative governments is a moral imperative can easily become a form of not being careful. Much is made of politicians who have little patience for "democratic norms," but those are also politicians who tend to understand what their constituents want and expect from them, and they put in the effort to deliver it. And not needing to work around the law or political opposition parties (especially opposition parties motivated by negative partisanship) can make the job much easier than it is elsewhere.

People understand which side their bread may be buttered on, and they understand costs and trade-offs. Western governments today aren't, in my opinion, doing a very good job of making the cost-benefit analysis work to their benefits. Some of it is simply a matter of maturity. Thailand, China and Bangladesh started from much lower baselines; so long as their governments were reasonably competent and free of corruption, the nations were going to grow; they were well placed to take advantage of changes in global demand. Europe and North America are going to have much harder times developing industries that both create a lot of value and employ large numbers of people at better than the current prevailing wages. But some of it is also the kruft, to use the technical term, that builds up in highly complex governments that have formalized and involved processes for change. Take generative automation tools. If various forms of both limited and capable artificial intelligence start erode the need for human mental labor what the industrial revolution did to physical labor, the advanced world is going to undergo a period of serious upheaval. If action is not proactive, it will need to be quick, and slow bureaucratic processes will not cut the mustard. If autocracies prove to be more nimble and responsive, people will continue to sour on liberal democracy, and the citizens of autocracies will be even more convinced that turning a blind eye was the right choice.