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Comment by naming_the_user | Hacker News Reader

> Those AI profiles included Liv, whose profile described her as a “proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller”

I find this stuff absolutely fascinating, that even an AI bot tries to do this sort of thing.

It just strikes me that there is no world in which racism will ever die out as long as things like this are happening. You can't have it both ways.

If race is just melanin content then we have no issue. That's the win case.

If your race is something that you need to proudly announce (because you personally feel that it has cultural connotations in most/many cases), then race is always going to be an issue, because of assumptions of those cultural differences.

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You write this as if the AI itself independently decided to write that profile. That's almost assuredly not the case. Someone at Meta decided to make a bot that reinforced race identity and announce it, and likely tuned the LLM behind it to specifically do things to reinforce that identity and pretend as best as possible to be the exact menanin-informed expectation of its AI-generated avatar.

An AI bot didn't try to do this. Someone at Meta, who was likely none of the things in the profile, decided to do this.

> You write this as if the AI itself independently decided to write that profile.

There are numerous fake social media pages where posters oretend to be a minority, but are run by state actors to sow division in the US. Those have been extremely successful in fooling people; I wonder if its success is related to pre-existing biases readers already have in terms how they think "others" talk.

And the only way to construct an AI like that is to enumerate tainted stereotypes. It's an all around bad idea regardless of if you're pro-DEI or anti-woke.

Guess what, race is an issue and the group identity you're seeing is a defense mechanism against many generations of intentional cultural eradication and appropriation.

We should not be in the business of telling other people which aspects of themselves they can and cannot identify with. Admonishing black identity is perpetuating this cultural eradication, and so it is not the neutral position you think it is.

That's all tangential from the topic at hand anyway. On-topic, Liv is a great example of the corporate appropriation of culture.

> If your race is something that you need to proudly announce (because you personally feel that it has cultural connotations in most/many cases), then race is always going to be an issue, because of assumptions of those cultural differences.

No it's not. Acknowledging the current situation is not an assumption and does not doom us to push every single aspect onto future generations.

Culture is real. The way to change part of culture is not to simply deny that that part exists.

Would you say the same if the bot identified itself as being from a certain religion? Or working for a specific company? Having a random personality trait? Supporting a sports team? No one would bat an eye, and none of those would mean it is okay to discriminate against them on that basis.

Removing racism does not mean removing race.

I think it is fine to discriminate against companies (that's what boycotts are) and sports teams (that's what rivals do).

Yea, if anything a bot that just reposts and talks about sports news for a specific team is kinda the perfect test case for something like this. It lets you test "identity" for a bot, but no one's going to be that upset if the Mets Fan Bot isn't sufficiently obsessed. Plus, it'll know all of the history and stats for the team, even if it'll probably be wrong a lot. Not that most human fans aren't wrong a lot about their sports teams' history.

it's fine to discriminate agains actions and behavior or self-proclaimed or observed values.

but it's dumb to discriminate against coincidental attributes.

there are things that bots, by virtue of being bots, cannot be - they cannot be of a particular religion, possess a gender, or have a particular race. They can work for a specific company. They cannot have a personality, but they can exhibit personality traits.

Anything that a bot can do and possess I have no difficulty in its being labelled as doing and possessing those things.

Otherwise I do have problems, although theoretically a bot could exist as a piece of art and in that case we should forgive these lying claims to qualities they cannot possess by the current standards our society holds for artistic practice.

People will discriminate against people of color because they are visually people of color. Whether or not they 'announce it'. It's utter BS to suggest that the only reason people discriminate against black people is because they 'identify as black'.

Like, if all the black people would just stop identifying as 'black' racism would be solved?

Maybe I'm misreading your comment, but all of the responses to this suggest to me you're on a different planet than I am. Alternatively you drank the early 2000s kool-aid that "people don't see race" and thought that was actually working until people started identifying as the thing they get criticized on the internet for being.

I believe that many people in US are just pyromaniac firefighters that start fired to play hero extinguishing it. Racism is just one of the fires.

In my country (Eastern Europe) racism is approximately non-existent, but nobody was putting gas on fire for decades or more. I know a black guy that is quite famous around here, do you know what he never said? "I am a proud black person". He is a great person and people love him.

Ever heard of the Bosnian war? Many in eastern europe hate gypsies too. Maybe they don't discriminate on the color of skin specifically all, but they definitely hate based on culture.

I was in Sarajevo during those times for a couple of days, so I remember. Also in Pristina. Yes, many people in Eastern Europe used to dislike gypsies, when I was a kid it was widespread, but I never heard anything about this in the past 10 years. This fire is out, probably on a permanent basis.

2 things: 1. Just because you're not confronted with racism daily doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Boston is considered one of the most racist cities in the US, because once per sports game they scream the n-word at a black person. I'm like 99% certain I've heard similar stories in European countries.

2. The second part of your analogy is the "I know a black guy" trope that happens in the US. It's a pretty common thing, and no one believes people are 'not racist' just because they 'know a black guy'.

How were the Jews treated in your country in oh, say the late 1930s?

Terribly. I know from my grandparents and their Jew friends (40% of their small town were Jews), most did not survive (<5% after war), I met one in the '80.

How are they treated now? Asking my past 2 managers, both Jews, Israeli citizens doing business in Eastern Europe, they are happy with the current times. This fire is also put out.

Which part of Eastern Europe? I’ve lived in various parts of what might be considered Eastern Europe for most of my life, and while there isn’t a hyper-focus on race like in the US, I know that racism still exists. I still see it first hand.

I worked in the Balkans with a team that covered 9 countries (except Greece), I was doing trips all over the place on a weekly basis for several years. Currently living in Romania.

Can you provide some examples of racism? I am aware of some against Gypsies 40-50 years ago, but it is gone these days. Even that, it was against the culture, not the people, Gypsies going "modern way" were fully accepted, but traditions like kid marriage or living a nomadic life in carriages was not.

In this case I’m talking about overt, vocal racism against black and brown people in Poland and Ukraine where I have lived for several years.

That isn’t to say that I think central or Eastern Europe are outliers — I have personally witnessed at least as much racism in countries considered to be more progressive, like Sweden.

The point is, to say it’s virtually nonexistent is plainly untrue.

I find it hard to believe that someone would say something similar about any other aspect of cultural identity and not be instantly flagged for it.

Are you truly advocating that people should no longer be proud of their cultural identity? Are you applying that to all the folks in tech who proudly identify as Christian or Jewish? Does it apply to Italian Americans and Indigenous people? What about folks who are proud to speak endangered languages, like West Flemish or Romani?

>> Are you truly advocating that people should no longer be proud of their cultural identity?

My take on the comment was that so long as a trait is relevant to some people, it will be dispised by some other people. Either it's completely benign or it's somewhat polarizing. There are few things that only range from neutral to positive without detractors.

All of the examples you give are unique in their own ways, I don't have the wherewithal to go through them all, but if I choose one:

A person describing themselves as being Christian is only signaling that they are a follower of the Christian faith to some degree.

They are different for that reason. Christian doesn't have a physical appearance associated with it (well, other than say vestments or pendants).

All Christians are Christian.

Not all Asian-appearing folk are culturally Asian, not all culturally Asian folk are Asian-appearing. Even the concept of "Asian culture" (I do of course accept that such a concept exists) is super general in a much wider ranging way than the Christian faith. Maybe that explains it better.

To illustrate it in another way, imagine some LLM prompts:

"Hi ChatGPT, can you make me a poem written by a Christian about their faith?"

"Hi ChatGPT, can you make me a poem written by a White person about their culture?"

There is just a fundamental... grammatical wrongness(?) about the last one in my mind, I'm not sure that I can explain it if it's not already obvious.

Why can't you just be American?

Both my parents were born here, they've explained our lineage, but I literally don't care. I'm an American, America is my culture and country.

Because my friend who just worked for years to become an American citizen after immigrating here and working for the US government still has other Americans tell him to "go back to where he came from" because he's evidently not American enough for them.

A hell of a lot of people want to "just be American" and a lot of Americans won't let them.

Some people are just angry and will direct it at whatever. Not saying it's OK, but once you really internalize the idea that people's reactions say more about themselves than about you life gets better.

That makes the bold assumption those people aren't your boss or your customers or your landlord or the policeman stopping you on the side of the road. There's real risk, both financially and physically, to just assuming that "random anger" is something you can internalize and ignore.

People who are "just angry and will direct it at whatever" can be very dangerous, as we've seen in the US even this week and in every school shooting and terrorist attack for years.

This is, terribly, the American experience. It used to be the Irish and the Italians before we decided they were "White enough." It doesn't mean we should just ignore it and accept it. If you're mad, that doesn't give you a pass to be a racist asshole to the first person less pale than a porcelain plate you see.

If anything, the fact that people have to know and cope with random Americans being this exact sort of racist asshole to them is the reason they form their own communities and see themselves as Black Americans or Asian Americans or any other sort of national or racial group.

Are you truly advocating that people should no longer be proud of their cultural identity?

(Shrug) If you didn't build it, what could possibly justify taking pride in it?

Pride in inborn cultural identity gets you things like Nazi Germany. It's not a win for either individuals or societies, only for intermediate subgroups whose interests rarely coincide with either.

It's not so much that the LLMs generate profiles like “proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller”, but they seem to generate such profiles at rates much higher (perhaps an order of magnitude) than the IRL versions of such actually exist.

We don’t know that bio was generated by an AI. I suspect it was written by one of Facebook’s team as part of the “prompt”. It matches how I’ve seen meta engineers talk about black women.

Overwhelmingly white and rich engineers

Race is clearly cultural in todays society because we can make it so. Very unlikely to be genetically culturally if that is what you are saying (but of course, who knows).

What I'm saying is that it the AI to me illustrates how much of a self-own drawing these cultural battle lines is.

If you choose to describe yourself by the colour of your skin first and foremost then you're telling everyone that you think that's relevant information which is, well.. the entire problem - you're telling everyone around you that you think it has predictive power.

But that's what racists are, people who think the race of a person has predictive power with regard to their nature, culture etc.

We can't expect people whose lives are, in great part, defined by the societal oppression they face, to be at the forefront of trying to erase the distinctions the bigots hold over them – not least because it'd be ineffective, serving only to hide the abuse. The categorisation schemes used by bigots (e.g. racists) do have predictive power: for the behaviour of bigots, and the resulting effects on the social context of people's lives.

People being loud and proud about their marginalised identities is not a problem. The pushback, and the pushback-to-the-pushback, and the pushback-to-the-pushback-to-the-pushback (the so-called "culture war") is a problem to the extent it gets in the way of solving the root problem (marginalisation, bigotry, and abuse), but statements of pride help address the root problem.

Rather than criticise "drawing these cultural battle lines", please fight the fight you think people should be fighting. You won't find yourself short of allies, should you make the effort. (Effort includes educating yourself about the relevant issues: it's pretty easy to find highly-specific resources. If you're completely stuck, and somehow have lost access to Wikipedia, visit your local library.)

Being proud of your identity and culture is not a problem at all!

The thing that I feel that this silly AI bot draws into sharp contrast is the idea that there can simultaneously be "asian/white/black culture" - as a generalised thing, not a person's experience in a neighbourhood or a country, literally just "white/black/asianness" (or whatever), and obviously the connotation there is that skin colour is intrinsically linked to culture, but then we expect people to pretend that skin colour has no correlation.

You can't have it both ways, it's a contradiction.

And here we have, err, a computer program, or the output of one, pulling in all of this stuff and claiming that it has a culture based on experiences of being a skin colour that it doesn't and can't even have.

It's just madness on every level!

That's a false dichotomy. The "intrinsically" connotation is not there (you're reading that in), but civil rights activists often discuss the relationships between culture and skin colour. Any book (or Wikipedia article) on the subject should provide this information, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory.

I do agree that the AI bots were farcical, but they don't highlight what you're saying. You're talking about nth-degree pushback-to-pushback as though it's the actual facts-on-the-ground, which it's not. (The "culture war" is composed solely of the assumption that there is culture war, and people's responses to that: unlike the real issues, like systematic oppression, it'll go away as soon as we stop talking about it.)

> But that's what racists are, people who think the race of a person has predictive power with regard to their nature, culture etc.

I didn't think that's how the term racist is normally used. A definition:

a person who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group

Big difference.

To be fair, how the term is normally used depends entirely on the group within which the term is being used. For many, racism is strictly “prejudice + power”, which logically concludes in the [in my opinion rather warped] idea that some groups are incapable of racism, which is at odds with the definition you’re citing

> the idea that some groups are incapable of racism, which is at odds with the definition you’re citing

I disagree, because one can powerless while simultaneously being prejudiced and antagonistic to others. Which means that anyone can be racist.

You're right, but in practice I don't really consider it as being too fundamentally different because it's the logical conclusion from strong enough predictive power.

There is nothing "logical" about the progression from my appearance and ancestry is something I'm entitled to be proud of; also there might actually be such a thing as Black American culture to racial epithets and Jim Crow laws. Or indeed using "predictive power" to assess people's intellectual ability or criminal propensity from their melanin content.

I mean, do you believe that people should expect to be subjected to the weirdest and most hostile takes on gender relations and treated as potential rapists or sluts unless and until everyone uses gender neutral pronouns (even silly bots mostly identify as male and female at the moment)? If not, what is it about racism that obliges victims not to affirm their identity if they wish to cease to become victims?

It's rather impressive that you can point to assumptions about identity and then conclude that racism comes from people having identity.

I understand Elon and Pmarca to be saying that this behavior is programmed in by 'safety teams' at Meta.

It is an odd way of calcifying late-20th century American upper class anxiety. If we can't give the engineers a different moral goal, it will become the default mode of knowledge. A more immediate problem than "AI will kill us" is the dev teams determined to avoid "erasure" or "digital genocide" or whatever they'd call a race/culture-agnostic AI.

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