Week 7: Algorithms and machine learning
“The stage was set, the lights were on, and the crowd was cheering. The famous singer, Grace, was about to perform her biggest hit. As she took the stage, she could feel her heart racing with excitement. But as the music started playing, she froze. Her mind went blank, and she couldn’t remember a single line of the song. Panic set in as she frantically tried to recall the lyrics. The audience started to notice, and murmurs spread throughout the crowd. Just when she was about to give up, her backup singer whispered the first few lines, and Grace’s memory came rushing back. She smiled and continued the song, and the audience erupted into cheers once again. Despite the hiccup, Grace’s performance was flawless. It just goes to show that even the most talented and experienced performers can have their moments of forgetfulness. But with a little help, they can overcome any obstacle and shine on stage.”
Squibler’s ai generated story
What kind of story do you think this is? The inspiring story of Grace, who in the face of failure, managed to overcome her mistake and shine on stage, is actually an AI generated story using Squibler. Let me explain why I did this.
The ruling ideas in society just reflect ideas of the ruling class and tools like AI exist as the product of power structures. Technology designers are able to embed their own prejudices and judgement into the coding of tools like Squibler, and the result is AI content that reflects the ideology of the ruling class. AI– artificial intelligence– doesn’t create something brand new, it just regurgitates things that humans have already made. The core beliefs embedded in AI content are not original, they reflect us. Or rather, they reflect the ideas of the ruling class in technology.
I wanted to investigate this further, and I wondered just how much human judgement bleeds into our technology. Using the Squibler site, I input the prompt, ‘a singer forgets lines while on stage’. The story produced from Squibler is what you read right at the beginning of this post.
why, despite the fact that I purposely did not use pronouns in the prompt I gave, did Sqibler make the character a woman? It appears as though the AI connected forgetting lyrics with women. Considering that the tech industry is a male-dominated field, the ruling class in this setting is the man. From this, we can infer that during the coding, it was assumed that a woman would a) be more likely to be a singer and b) be more susceptible to forget important things when under pressure, such as performing their biggest hit on stage.
Furthermore, it could be suggested that this is also a reflection of the way men think in the tech industry. With women being a minority in the field, it may be thought that women are less likely to be able to perform under pressure, thus their absence in the field. AI is just a reflection of the ideas of the creators– of men who work in a male dominated field. With this continuous cycle that feeds into harmful prejudices and stereotypes, is it possible that women will ever be able to be represented fairly? Because AI reflects ruling class ideology, it appears that as long as the cycle continues, it will be hard for women to break through without some real, systemic changes.
This is one of the main reasons that I don’t like AI, because it only seems to spew out already harmful stereotypes. Enough of that exists in the real world, the last thing we need is for an artificial intelligence bot to do it too.