MundaneBlog

November 17, 2024

Links you should read 2024-11-16

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , — DrMundane @ 12:02 am

Staring at 404media.co, with Becky Ferreira writing this weeks edition of ‘the Abstract’. The portion that really stirs my mind is the story on AI poetry, and how in one test readers preferred the AI generated poems. Why? To quote the article quoting the research

“Non-expert poetry readers expect to like human-authored poems more than they like AI-generated poems,” said authors Brian Porter and Edouard Machery of the University of Pittsburgh. “But in fact, they find the AI-generated poems easier to interpret; they can more easily understand images, themes, and emotions in the AI-generated poetry than they can in the more complex poetry of human poets. They therefore prefer these poems, and misinterpret their own preference as evidence of human authorship.”  

I must say I am disheartened by this result. Not particularly surprised. As far as I am concerned much of the joy of poetry is in chewing on it. I have had great conversations on the poems I send out on my Christmas cards, and I feel this only because both of us had really thought on the poem (A burdock clawed my gown, not burdocks blame, but mine…) and then weeks later had a chance to discuss what it means to us. Luckily poetry will live on, I have no fear of that. We may just have to sing its praises louder.

On the politics front, Orac at Respectful Insolence describes why exactly RFK Jr. is bad news as HHS secretary. I can’t help but agree with him that the media has done a fine job of making RFK Jr. seem far more palatable than he is, and I expect that trend to continue. They will cover this administration ‘as usual’, so they can maintain their access.

In a surprising turn of events, I agree with Bill Clinton. Per the NYT:

President-elect Donald J. Trump made Vice President Kamala Harris’s support for transgender rights a core part of his argument that she was outside the political mainstream. His campaign used video of Ms. Harris expressing support for taxpayer-funded transition surgeries for transgender inmates in a torrent of ads that declared: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

The Harris campaign largely did not answer those ads, but, internally, the Democratic Party was roiled by them. Former President Bill Clinton was said to have urged the Harris campaign to respond to them, and to have been told that they were not making an obvious dent in the race.

I had certainly felt (and have not written it… argh) that the Democratic Party had really failed in any messaging defending trans people, and this to me sounds exactly like how I expected them to talk about it. Running right down the middle and not standing for anything. Take it for granted that you will get their votes. Such an approach is not up to the seriousness of this moment. Token resistance will not be enough. Words will not be enough. Definite action will be needed. Will they be willing to pay the political cost? I doubt it.

I’m sorry. Perhaps I am too negative.

To end on a positive note, more from my archive.

November 4, 2024

Gender Normativity and Facial Recognition

Filed under: Gender,Uncategorized — Tags: , , — DrMundane @ 11:48 am

Reading the always wonderful “Pivot to AI” by Amy Castor and David Gerard, and they link to a great 2019 piece by Os Keyes, “The Body Instrumental” which was new to me and enjoyable. Well, enjoyable in that particular way that any sufficiently prescient and worrying thing can be enjoyable. I have been thinking briefly as of late on heteronormativity, so both articles were a great coincidence.

I can’t restate any point not already sufficiently covered by the two articles above, but it really does strike me that any such “gender determining” (perhaps really “sex determining” in the end is their goal, reflecting the binary and exclusive nature of sex and gender for them, not that either is so binary as they think) AI will be inescapably heteronormative (perhaps “gender normative”, as I am speaking mostly in the gender, expression, and such things realm, not in the relational sense, although I take the term to apply to both. I can not claim to be an experienced scholar of gender, so forgive me if my terminology is incorrect. I was just reading Sex in Public, so, like, 1998?. Still very much a relevant work in my mind, but my cognition is biased towards that which I can remember in the moment).

The training data is classified first by humans, who will have to fit each photo into a binary category, man or woman. Most of the data will likely be of people who “pass” or perform gender in the correct way, simply owing to the dominance of such images in the training data. Movies, photos, public domain images, et cetera. Simply by volume alone the normative wins out, and therefore any such AI will be biased in its favor. It will be biased to fit people into these categories.

Turning to prognostication, who will be allowed to opt out? To gate access to a room or facility behind such an AI means that the non-normative, the queer, will be penalized. Even if one is notionally allowed to opt out, the process of doing so may very well lead to further stigmatization simply by virtue of being the different one.

As Keyes states: “We should focus on delegitimizing the technology altogether, ensuring it never gets integrated into society, and that facial recognition as a whole (with its many, many inherent problems) goes the same way.”

I could not have said it better or any earlier. You simply must read the whole article, as the portion on how the AI will reshape gender in its image is brilliant and gets to the very heart of not just the AI problem, but of problems of gender in society more broadly.

October 19, 2024

This is how it begins

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — DrMundane @ 12:16 am

Those were my thoughts upon reading the NYT this morning.

I want to leave it at that, but it feels as though I owe the thought a few more words.

I think if one was going for trans genocide, this is certainly a good way to keep the ball rolling (The closure of the clinic happened in 2021, but now I am reminded again of the cruelty). This is because we, as a nation, have certain thoughts (generally) about children and their personhood. Mainly they aren’t full people and for many they are more akin to property. Therefore, a child can have no sense of their gender (2024-11-16 edit – and/or sex) outside of their parents’ sense of what the child’s gender (2024-11-16 edit – and/or sex) ought to be.

Furthermore, as the whole thing has turned into a ‘culture war’ and a political talking point, far separated from the actual issue of: doing the right thing, quantifying what’s the best way to help these children, or creating a humane society that won’t discriminate against them or use them as a target of violence for political gain and personal gratification (I must imagine.).

I could keep writing but it belabors my final point.

I do believe that presently the Republican Party and others are engaged in a campaign of eventual trans genocide and queer genocide more generally. The point is to try and destroy all those who are trans and prevent certainly anyone else from coming out. I think a murder is a murder, no matter if you pulled the trigger or just loaded the gun. If you create a society where trans kids can’t get care, you are creating a society that is ok with some of those kids killing themselves. It is murder by the lawmakers’ hands all the same.

You start with children since they are vulnerable and the parents are more easily convinced to doubt. Once that’s done you prevent adults from living as they are and as they please. The cruelty happens to be a happy bonus, from giving the mob their enemy.

From there, if it doesn’t happen simultaneously, I expect same sex marriage and queerness in general to be the target.

I have some hope that such a thing will be unacceptable to the wider American public. But I worry that the American public is still sufficiently transphobic in a large enough quantity that people will be hurt. I know it, in fact, as they are already hurting people.

I find it terribly hard to get to an ending. I wonder if I’m not overselling the point.

But it’s hard to listen to these people and not believe them when they tell the world what they want.

Let it never be said DrMundane isn’t passionate about anything…. Right? Who knows.

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