I have never seen an advertising campaign more evil, more insidious than the one for the army currently airing in the UK
“This is belonging”
We’re introduced to a group of earnest young men. they’re white, they’re black. they drink tea. they play practical jokes. they quote popular TV shows. they talk about sports. they face their fears. it’s loving and domestic and all too easy to overlook the guns and camo and helicopters blaring overhead.
make no mistake, these adverts are aimed at the young and disenfranchised. poor people, people of colour, people who have been bullied and abused by society and made to feel like they don’t belong anywhere. Join the army, they’re told, and you can have the love and acceptance you crave but have always been denied. Elsewhere, you might get called racial slurs. you might get called a pansy or a fairy, but not here. You belong with us.
For example: Islamophobia is rampant in the UK. here we have an advert of a Muslim soldier praying while his squadron, armed to the teeth, sits in silence. the message is clear - while the rest of society may despise you, here, you will be respected. this is belonging.
here’s one called ‘expressing my emotions’, featuring a white man in his 40s - practically the posterchild for the UK’s current mental health crisis.
you don’t have to worry about bottling up your feelings in the army. after all, this is belonging.
here’s another one called ‘can I be gay in the army?’. we’re told: “I was really worried about whether I’d be accepted, but within days, I was more than confident in being who I was.” Clearly homophobia is a thing of the past in the army. don’t worry. this is belonging.
and it works. while the response to these adverts from an unfortunately vocal number of people is basically “fuck you, we’re racist and proud of it!” there are young people being taken in by this. I have met gay children, trans children who are determined to join the army because, after being rejected by their parents and peers, they’re now being told “here you will be accepted. here you will be loved.”
fuck that. don’t be groomed; don’t let the vulnerable and desperate people in your life be groomed. we need to fight the root causes of these problems in our society and stamp them out so that wielding a gun and cowering in some blown-out building in a country you helped destroy is no longer seen as some sort of salvation. fight racism. fight homophobia and transphobia. fight the stigmatisation of mental illness. fight the system that prioritises the rich and leaves the rest of us to rot.
don’t be taken in by something that offers easy answers, chews you up and spits you out, destroyed, guilty, with PTSD and nowhere to go. where do you belong when you can’t fight any more? where do you belong when you can no longer be used?
you are not immune to propaganda
Plus they started airing these just around the time of exam results days, purposely targeting young people who are worried about failing/have failed their exams and are scared about their future. It’s fucking disgusting
In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.
Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.
“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”
“It insists she’s the mafia.”
“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”
“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”
I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.
This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.
There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.
Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.
TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help
a bunch of pissed off vampires stuck in Venice because they can’t go over moving water
Not to victim blame, but you’d have to be a pretty bad Italian to even get turned into a vampire in the first place.
the only two places practically immune to vampires are texas and italy
Let me tell you of A Thing.
Lithuania has no vampires, I guarantee it.
Lithuania has one vampire, and let me tell you, she’s gonna be FURY UNLEASHED once someone gets her out of the centre of that crossterfuck of a burial point.
“Starter house”?????? We’re supposed to have more than one house???????
So now you want to listen to what we’ve been hollering about since before fucking Occupy Wallstreet?????
They started us off $35k+ in student loan debt, paid us ‘70s wages, charged us modern prices, and then couldn’t understand why we were broke.
Is “no shit, sherlock?” still an acceptable answer?
Oh, the “starter house” thing. This is what you used to do when you were just starting out: you bought a house for just you and your spouse. You sold it to a younger couple and moved into a bigger house no later than the birth of your first or second kid. By that time, you were supposed to have been promoted and gotten a raise or two, at least… oh, and by the way, that raise was to be big enough that you could not only afford that bigger house, you could afford it on one salary, because that was when your wife stopped working to stay home with the kids.
That’s how my grandparents (immediately post-WWII) did it. That’s how my parents (mid-1970s) did it. Oh, and the third house my parents ever purchased, when they upgraded to a still affordable but spacious and very nice one, when I was a preteen? The purchase price was maybe 1.5 times my dad’s salary, with payments spread out over a 30-year mortgage.
But yeah, Millennials, who mostly weren’t even born the last time this was feasible, are the ones who are ruining everything.
As frustratingly obvious as this is to many of us, just remember that these studies are GOOD!
This is proving what is really happening! Studies like this will start real discussions on making change. Even if it takes a while yet, this is another step forward!
