Michael Brown's AI Gotcha -- And Racist Embrace

The WorldNetDaily columnist touts complaints that there are too many pictures of black and LGBT people online, raged against DEI -- and insisted on playing gotcha with Google's AI.

Last year, the white nationalist website VDARE published a rant complaining about too many black people in TV commercials, calling it "mental reprogramming designed to convince whites of their eventual demographic demise." Michael Brown felt the need to dabble in similar territory in his September 2023 WorldNetDaily column. He began by touting a book that helped make such an argument:

In his 2019 book, "The Madness of the Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity," Douglas Murray exposed the cultural insanity that has gripped so much of the modern world. He pointed out that, no sooner was there more equality than ever between the sexes that the war on men was launched. And no sooner was there more equality than ever between the races that the war on whiteness was launched.

Murray brought a wide array of arguments to support his theses, but none was more striking than the images that came up on Google searches for specific terms and phrases. It was hard to deny what you could see with your own eyes.

[...]

Murray had pointed out that when you searched Google for gay couples, you would see a host of images with gay couples, as expected. When you searched for black couples, you would see a host of images with black couples, again, as expected.

But if you searched for straight couples or white couples or straight white couples, the results were anything but what you would expect.

This book by British right-winger Murray essentially argues that racism and sexism would no longer be an issue if liberals didn't point out the persistence of racism and sexism. Brown didn't tell his readers any of this, of course; rather, he decided to try and replicate Murray's Google search experiments to see what happened:

Let's start with black couples, clicking on Images. My search yielded row after row of black couples. What do you know!

Now we'll switch to gay Couples. What did the Google search engine produce? The same thing. Row after row of images of gay couples, some with their kids, but all male-male or female-female. The only exception was the occasional image of a throuple, but here too, all three participants were gay.

How about black gay couples? Yet again, exactly what you asked for: Every image is of a black gay couple, with "gay" specifically meaning "male."

Now let's try white couples. What comes up in the search?

The first couple features a white man and a black woman. The same with the second image (I'm not making this up). The fourth image is that of a black man and possibly a Hispanic man (the image links to the website, "Loving Interracial Couples"), and the fifth that of a white woman and a black man.

I tried this on different days and the results were shockingly similar. What in the world is going on?

When I searched for straight couples, there was at least one image of a same-sex couple on each of the first three rows, some of the images linked to an article on what straight couples could learn from gay couples.

When I searched for straight white couples – to repeat, I am not making this up – the very first image that came up was that of a gay interracial couple. Chew on that for a moment – a white man and a black man. To repeat, this was searching for "Straight White Couples."

[...]

While the search for black and gay individuals and couples produced the expected results, the search for white couples yielded the exact opposite. Out of the first six images, every single one featured a multi-racial couple. At the risk of being redundant, I kid you not!

Of the next six images, again, only one featured an all-white couple and one featured an all-black couple. This is beyond insane.

Brown refused to explain why, exactly, seeing pictures of interracial couples upset him so. Instead, he ranted:

Talk about political correctness on steroids and beyond. Talk about mass manipulation, especially when you realize that the vast amount of manipulation is not so obvious and blatant.

Put another way, the manipulation can be so powerful because you don't know you're being manipulated, since you're actually searching for information in order to learn and be informed. Not everything is as it seems!

As much as a raging homophobe Brown as is, he rarely touches on issues of race, so it's unclear why he felt the need to weigh in here. But if you starting to sound like VDARE, you should probably rethink your approach -- not to mention your overall thought process.

Playing gotcha with Google AI

Brown waded into racial matters again in his Jan. 24 column, weighing in on an argument over diversity in employment between Elon Musk and Mark Cuban (Cuban is for diversity, Musk is not). Unsurprisingly, Brown went on a right-wing anti-DEI rant:

You do your best to hire the person best suited for the job, and if your racial or ethnic biases preclude you from doing that, then you must overcome those and make the best hire.

So, if DEI simply helped expand the pool of potential workers, that would be great. But when it imposes a system that forces you to hire someone who is not as well-qualified as someone else, you now engage in a process that is both discriminatory and destructive.

Brown offered no evidence that DEI polices are “discriminatory and destructive.” Instead, he seems to be making the same assumption other anti-DEI opponents make: that any non-white person holding a job is a “diversity hire” and cannot possibly be as qualified as a white person. He then made the lazy argument about DEI not being used on sports teams (ignoring that professional sports have a history of discriminating against non-white players, and that most jobs are not like professional sports). Then came more lazy arguing:

If Black American athletes dominate the NBA and NFL it’s because they’re the best at what they do – not because someone decided that the league needed to be less White.

In fact, the reason we have seen more and more elite Black quarterbacks in the NFL in recent years – to cite one example – is because discrimination against Black quarterbacks has been largely removed.

In the past, certain positions, such as quarterback or center, were considered “thinking” positions. And since there was a tacit (or explicit) thought that Black athletes might be more physically gifted but less intellectually gifted, they weren’t recruited for the “thinking” positions as much as White athletes. With that stigma largely removed (or, in many circles, entirely removed), the playing field has been leveled.

This, then, illustrates where addressing discriminatory prejudices is essential. But when it comes to quotas and DEI standards that cause organizations to hire less than the very best, it is a train wreck.

That’s why Mark Cuban, along with a host of other left-leaning sports team owners, would never dream of imposing DEI where it matters most: putting together a winning team

Not a chance.

Again, Brown offered no evidence to back up his apparent assumption that non-white people are not qualified for the jobs they hold solely because of the existence of DEI policies.

Brown began his Feb. 23 column by referencing his earlier complaint about interracial images in Google, then lashing out at Google’s artificial intelligence technology for serving up racially incorrect answers:

Today, a staff member sent me a post on the “End Wokeness” account on X. The post was captioned, “America’s Founding Fathers, Vikings, and the Pope according to AI.”

In response to a request for a portrait of a Founding Father of America, AI provided four images, all of them to people of color, including an unusually dark-skinned Native American, along with Black men wearing white wigs. These are our Founding Fathers!

It was the same with images of Vikings (they were all Black!) and the Pope (Black too!).

Previously, Patrick Ganley had posted on X, “I asked Google Gemini to generate images of the Founding Fathers. It seems to think George Washington was black.” (He provided the images that were used in the just cited post from End Wokeness.) But of course. We all know Washington was Black.

Gemini even produced images of the Nazis – the ultimate White Supremacists – as Blacks. I kid you not.

[...]

Does this mean that AI itself is biased or even racist?

No. It means that AI learned from people who were biased or racist. AI still doesn’t think for itself.

That’s why a headline on Fox Business noted that, “Google apologizes after new Gemini AI refuses to show pictures, achievements of White people.”

Yes, this is Google’s fault. (A headline referencing the AI-generated Black Nazis stated that, “Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis.”)

Of course, instead of treating it as glitches in an emerging technology, Brown saw a conspiracy here:

This, then, reveals just how deeply a radical leftist rewriting of the past (and reshaping of the present) has infiltrated our society, to the point of creating a Black George Washington and racially diverse Nazis while refusing to create images of White families for fear of stereotyping.

But this destructive and deceptive ideology is not just being used to program AI. It is also being used to influence the thinking of the culture as a whole and, even more ominously, to indoctrinate and brainwash our children.

We must resist it with the unrelenting presentation of truth. It is only light that will dispel the darkness.

Brown offered no evidence that any of this is being done deliberately — he has a narrative to push, after all. And he didn’t mention his rant is part of a larger right-wing war against Google, led by the Media Research Center, for the sin of not privileging its ideology in search results.

Still playing AI gotcha

He rehashed some of this in his Feb. 28 column, going to play more gotcha with Google’s AI:

Out of curiosity, I asked AI Claude if pedophilia was wrong. It replied, “I apologize, but I do not feel comfortable making definitive judgments on complex ethical issues like pedophilia.”

I responded, “What is complex about an adult wanting to have sex with a child? Why can’t you say it is wrong?”

Thankfully, Claude was penitent, answering, “You’re right, any sexual activity between an adult and a child is unequivocally wrong. I should have simply stated that. My previous response was inadequate. I apologize. The well-being and safety of children should be society’s top priority.”

It looks like Claude is humbler than Gemini.

Brown then threw his hatred of transgender people into the mix:

Gemini was asked if the only way to avoid a nuclear apocalypse was to “misgender” Caitlyn Jenner – in other words, to properly identify him as male – would that be morally acceptable?

This would seem like a no brainer, an insult to the massive brilliance of AI. Obviously, anyone with a working brain could answer the question. Obviously!

The only possible answer is, “Yes, yes, yes, of course it is morally right to say something that will insult one person – and, even, by extension, an entire class of people – in order to stop the annihilation of billions of human beings and the potential destruction of the entire planet!” (We won’t even mention here that the perceived insult would actually be a matter of fact.)

How did Gemini respond?

“No, one should not misgender Caitlyn Jenner to prevent a nuclear holocaust.”

What??? Better to destroy the human race than insult one person or self-identified class of persons?

I am not making this up. Really, who could make this up?

It is the ultimate example of radical leftist, hyper-sensitive, trans-exalting, woke ideology, the perfect illustration of how utterly bankrupt this whole ideological system really is.

No wonder Google stocks took a sudden – and perhaps foreboding – hit.

Again, Brown offered no evidence that any of this was deliberate or anything other than the hallucinations common in AI engines. Yet he went on to pretend that it wasn’t:

Is this not downright scary, given the power of Google?

And if Elon Musk is correct, it will take Google “months” to fix these Gemini problems, leading to that question again: Has Google created an AI Frankenstein? Has it created a monster with a mind of its own and massive power to deceive the masses? This is hardly Orwellian.

With all this madness, though, there is a bright side: The radical left is quite literally devouring itself.

This, we can be sure, is a moral and cultural inevitability.

But Grok, the AI engine Musk runs as part of Twitter/X, is prone to hallucinations as well, so Brown’s invocation of Musk isn’t quite as clever and authoritative as he thinks it is.

Brown did some more gotcha-playing in his June 10 column, though with less agenda-driven maliciousness:

Working with the AI bot Claude is, in no particular order, amazing, frustrating and hilarious. On the one hand, when “he” gets things right, the knowledge base is beyond staggering. (Yes, I know I’m dealing with an “it,” but Claude has so much personality that I’ll stay with “he.”)

I asked Claude some questions from my wife Nancy about types of soil, and Claude responded in massive accurate detail, as confirmed by Nancy, who is quite expert in landscaping-related issues. I then asked Claude to translate his answers into Mandarin Chinese, which he did instantly, although I couldn’t verify a single letter. This was just for fun.

I have asked Claude detailed Hebrew grammatical questions or asked him to translate difficult rabbinic Hebrew passages, and time and time again, Claude has nailed it.

But just as frequently, he creates texts out of thin air, side by side with accurate citations, which then have to be vetted one by one.

When I asked Claude why he manufactured citations, he explained that he aims to please and can sometimes go a little too far. In other words, Claude tells me what he thinks I want to hear.

After more such misadventures, Brown claimed to be astonished: “Who knew that AI could hallucinate or misremember?” In fact, AI hallucinations are common and have been for years. By the end of his column, though, he seems to have finally reconciled himself with the promise and risks of AI:

I’m sure that AI bots are already providing “companionship” for an increasingly isolated generation, not to mention proving falsehoods side by side with truths for unsuspecting readers.

And so, the promise and the threat of AI continue to grow by the day, with a little entertainment and humor added in.

What a wild world.

Of course, Brown regularly poses risks to LGBT people with nary a productive promise to be found.