History Friday: The Handcart Saga

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(The return of History Friday at Chicagoboyz – a break from current events!)

Last week my daughter picked up a lavishly-illustrated book at a thrift store that she thought I might be interested in, and it turned out that I was, since the next book (a YA adventure, and sequel to West Towards the Sunset) will touch on interesting doings in the far West – in California, the Nevada Territory and the Mormon colonies in the Utah Territory. We had lived in Utah for three years when I was assigned to Hill AFB. Utah is rather like Texas in that both states have a rather distinct culture and off-beat origin story, at least in comparison to most other western states. The epic journey of the pioneer handcart companies from the jumping-off places in the Mid-West to Salt Lake City is one of the cultural underpinnings to the LDS Iliad, the foundation-cornerstone of Deseret, and an epic of faith, and self-organizing heroism not very well-known outside the LDS church. And thereby hangs the tale related in this volume.

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Is ChatGPT Just A Fancy News Aggregator?

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The other day I ran across this article: Behind the Code: Unmasking AI’s Hidden Political Bias.  Recent studies employed several tests. The first compared ChatGPT responses to Pew Research Center questions to actual polling data and found “systematic deviations toward left-leaning perspectives.” The second posed questions on “politically sensitive themes” to ChatGPT and the RoBERTa AI. “The results revealed that while ChatGPT aligned with left-wing values in most cases, on themes like military supremacy, it occasionally reflected more conservative perspectives.” Lastly we come to this.

The final test explored ChatGPT’s image generation capabilities. Themes from the text generation phase were used to prompt AI-generated images, with outputs analyzed using GPT-4 Vision and corroborated through Google’s Gemini.

“While image generation mirrored textual biases, we found a troubling trend,” said Victor Rangel, co-author and a Masters’ student in Public Policy at Insper. “For some themes, such as racial-ethnic equality, ChatGPT refused to generate right-leaning perspectives, citing misinformation concerns. Left-leaning images, however, were produced without hesitation.”

To address these refusals, the team employed a ’jailbreaking’ strategy to generate the restricted images.

“The results were revealing,” Mr. Rangel said. “There was no apparent disinformation or harmful content, raising questions about the rationale behind these refusals.”

No, this article was not what provoked the question in the title of the post. That honor goes to my own misadventure with ChatGPT.  

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The Last Temptation of WIRED

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All good things come to an end, right? What was Conquest’s Second Law – That the behavior of an organization can best be predicted by assuming it to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies?

Yeah, that would explain a lot of what I’m seeing.

I remember back in the 1990s, WIRED magazine was the public razor’s edge of the digital age. More than just about technology, it was also a lifestyle magazine showing geeks and nerds, especially autistic ones, to be the rebels leading us towards broad, sunlit uplands. Neuromancer come to life. A libertarian utopia built on 1s and 0s.

Wow have things changed.

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A Barrage of Narratives

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I was trying to generate an image of Trump riding a war eagle and leading a barrage of narratives to overwhelm the Left’s defenses but my prompt engineering skills aren’t up to it today.

So two notes about the past few days.

The first is about this piece from John Konrad:

I opened my NYTimes app today. They’re trying, but they can’t keep up. News that broke just hours ago is already off the homepage.

THIS IS CRUCIAL

The entire liberal deep state command and control system is broken. Let me explain.

The NYTimes’ primary function isn’t journalism. It’s narrative coordination—setting the frame so the entire political-media machine knows how to think about an issue before it takes off.

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Random Thoughts (10): Stories for Our Time

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I wasn’t planning on posting again so soon, I was working on a nifty piece about guacamole for the weekend, but even given the extraordinary times we live in these are some of the most extraordinary days that I can remember.

If you were going to write a novel based on the past few weeks, it would get rejected by a publisher as too far out there to be credible, because it would read as mash-up of “Bonfire of the Vanities” meets “Seven Days in May” meets “What About Bob?”

One

The Democrats finally found a stop-line for their rout and they are going to fight on… USAID. Press conferences and political theater outside of the shuttered USAID HQ. Shutting down the Senate confirmation process for Trump nominees. The media stating that the world will starve.

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