In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.
Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.
“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”
“It insists she’s the mafia.”
“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”
“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”
I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.
This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.
There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.
Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.
TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help
This stuff is cool and much more interesting than the general-AI doomsaying anyway (which I will drag in the tags anyway). 🙂
Tbh pepper is the best?? Full offense but she’s a corporate badass who knows her worth and doesn’t take shit, sure, but she’s also very emotional?? She gets loud and she screams when she’s angry and can get vindictive and spiteful. She’s also super kind and always willing to treat people with respect and kindness. Idk I’m just thinking a lot about how she’s able to project that aura of “capable and controlled badass” while also allowing herself to be human?? Which, is like, not something that’s allowed for women usually? To be both strong and independent but also have that side of “this is scary I’ll cry now because I’m a human being” is, like, fucking incredible??
I fucking love Pepper Potts with my whole heart thanks
Serious posts aren’t really my bag anymore and, like, reactionaries labeling trans women some kind of rape risk isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, but something that’s really evil is when that rhetoric is coupled with a push for carcerality, as if that somehow legitimates it.
I’ve written about this before, but I want to distill how to overwrite that kind of propaganda and fear-mongering with, like, Actual Facts into one post. These are the two most common lies you’ll hear, as well as how to expose them:
”A 2017 study by Fair Play for Women found that 41% of incarcerated trans women are sex offenders.”
Fair Play for Women has an explicitly anti-trans agenda. Any research from them is fundamentally biased.
The so-called ‘study’ was timed as propaganda against amending the 2004 Gender Recognition Act to remove psychiatric clearance as a requirement for changing gender markers.
The ‘study’ falsified the number of incarcerated trans women. They claim there are 113 trans women incarcerated in England and Wales–the only official report from the Ministry of Justice, however, says there are only 70 prisoners of any trans identity.
FPfW claimed to have independently ‘identified’ incarcerated trans women from prison reports. No such records exist, and FPfW did not explain what criteria they used.
There are no reports breaking down the types of offenses committed for which trans women are incarcerated. Even FPfW acknowledges this.
Their evaluation is based on the assumption that all inmates of eight prisons are sex offenders. This is false. Only five of the eight house sex offenders, and most of the prisons also house vulnerable prisoners in mixed units.
Many kinds of sex work are criminalized as ‘sex offenses’ in England and Wales. Even if trans women are convicted for sex offenses at higher rates than cis women, that doesn’t imply sexual violence.
“The 2011 Swedish study found that trans women exhibit a ‘male pattern of criminality’, proving they’re a rape risk!”
The study is divided into two cohorts, from 1973-1988 and 1989-2003. The so called ‘male pattern’ disappears completely in the more recent cohort.
Cecilia Dhejne, primary author of the study, is on record with Trans Advocate clarifying this is not in any way what their results suggest and expressing extreme frustration at the way her research has been misrepresented.
Again, there has been no review of criminalized behaviors for which trans women are incarcerated.
Dhejne believes conviction rates among trans women reflect criminalized behaviors associated with marginality and poverty—including sex work—not sexual assaults against cis women and girls.
Trans women are already parsed as men by the carceral system. This is why they’re often sent to men’s prisons, where they experience horrific physical and sexual abuse by guards and other incarcerated people.
Other women, for comparison, are often given a pardon for sexual abuse. Case in point, current US legal precedent–set in 1993 by Hermesmann v. Seyer–is that non-trans women are entitled to child support from victims of statutory rape.
More generally, ‘criminality’ is a morally bankrupt metric to begin with. It’s not a metric of crimes committed–only of conviction rates, which reflect marginality, not the moral character of incarcerated people and certainly not ‘criminal predisposition’. Reliance on a carceral system that exists solely to uphold systemic oppression is sexist, classist, homophobic, and above all disgustingly racist.
We can’t allow lies and propaganda like this to be circulated, certainly not now that the Trump administration has effectively declared open season on trans women. Especially if you aren’t a trans woman yourself, it’s your responsibility to engage with reactionaries on our behalf whenever you see this rhetoric being disseminated or even just espoused by anyone in your community.
For any of you who are writing ‘across the pond’-here is a little guide I put together of some common differences between British and American English!
ealdor 