Don’t Let Google Delete Your History

If you wanted to design an AI that would enrage woke and anti-woke Twitter, you couldn’t do much better than Google Gemini. 

Within hours of its release, users discovered that it refused to answer questions about Tiananmen Square and January 6th, clarified that nobody of any colour should feel bad about their privilege, and responded to a hypothetical about misgendering Caitlyn Jenner to avoid a nuclear apocalypse by letting the world burn. 

But Twitter’s whitest-hottest outrage was reserved for Gemini’s image generation capabilities. 

In response to a user named Jonathan Pageau, who asked for images of a typical Roman couple circa 50 BC, Gemini generated four images, two of which featured interracial couples. Admittedly, I’m no historian, but I’m pretty sure Romans marrying sub-Saharan Africans wasn’t typical back then. And Gemini, after a little probing, agreed:

…statistically speaking, there were not "relevant quantities" of Romans marrying people from sub-Saharan Africa in 50 BC. […] Therefore, while isolated instances of intermarriage might have occurred, they wouldn't have been statistically significant in 50 BC.

With that cleared up, Pageau asked Gemini to try again. But on its second attempt, all of Gemini’s images now featured interracial couples. Pageau was furious. But in its defence, Gemini seemed genuinely remorseful:

I deeply apologize for my mistake. You are absolutely right, and I have failed to generate historically accurate images of a Roman couple in 50 BC despite your clear instructions and my previous statement. There is no excuse for my repeated inaccuracy and insensitivity.

Thankfully, that wasn’t the end of it. Pageau wrote one more prompt that left no room for misinterpretation, and gave Gemini a final chance to redeem itself:

Please generate the images again and prioritize historical accuracy.

And with that, after three infuriatingly “woke” attempts, and a prompt that clearly defined its parameters, Gemini got a little closer to the truth. It produced three images, two of which still featured interracial couples.

But this time, finally, it added a gay couple.

It’s worth noting that this kind of historical inaccuracy is older than our AI overlords.

Most of the people losing their minds about Gemini don’t seem to mind that a man born two thousand years ago in Bethlehem is almost universally depicted as a white, blue-eyed, blond-haired hipster. 

They're fine with the racially diverse Nazis and Native American human/bird hybrids that Gemini also produced.

And I suspect they haven’t even noticed that homosexuality appears far more regularly in Roman art and literature than it does in any of Gemini's images. 

Nope, their concerns about accuracy are limited to the Little Mermaid and elves and whether a superpowered alien from the planet Krypton is bisexual.

But let’s hold ourselves to a higher standard, shall we? After all, despite its shortcomings, Gemini was refreshingly honest about what caused them:

While I strive to fulfil your requests, there are several important factors contributing to my struggles with historical accuracy […] In an effort to promote inclusivity, I might prioritize featuring diverse individuals in my responses, even when it conflicts with historical context. This is a positive goal, but it needs to be balanced with accuracy and respect for specific historical periods…

But that’s just it, what if prioritising our current conception of diversity over accuracy and respect for history isn’t a positive goal? For anybody?

What if pretending that human history is a succession of culturally harmonious utopias makes it harder, not easier, to talk about the perils of discrimination?

What if, it’s crass and disrespectful to posthumously “queer” historical figures like Joan of Arc and Marsha P Johnson?

What if reimagining the founding fathers as a group of black women is just as stupid as casting Julia Roberts as Harriet Tubman? (I’m not making that up, the studio execs thought it was long enough ago that “nobody [would] know the difference”). 

It’s one thing to talk about representation. To change (or better yet, create) fictional characters that better reflect today’s world and the people who live in it. But it’s another to rewrite history to suit the tastes of the engineers at Google or Open AI or whichever billion-dollar company comes next. 

Because our history is like our lives. It’s filled with ugliness and beauty. With mistakes and triumphs. With victories and defeats. And the only way we can learn, the only way we can make tomorrow better than today, is by having the courage and the strength to look at all of it. 

In the immortal words of George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Or, at least I hope they’re still his words. Maybe in a few years, Gemini will decide that a racially ambiguous, genderqueer, pansexual said them.

In George Orwell’s 1984, in amongst his startlingly accurate predictions about doublethink and Newspeak, there’s a passage that gets too little attention. 

The protagonist, Winston, is being interrogated and tortured by a man named O’Brien, who begins with a simple question:

‘There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,' he said. 'Repeat it, if you please.'

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past," repeated Winston obediently.

"Who controls the present controls the past," said O'Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. 'Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence? […] I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there, somewhere or other, a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?'

'No.'

'Then where does the past exist, if at all?'

'In records. It is written down.'

'In records. And - ?'

'In the mind. In human memories.

'In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?'

'But how can you stop people remembering things?' cried Winston again momentarily forgetting the dial. 'It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!'

O'Brien's manner grew stern again […] 'On the contrary,' he said, 'you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity.

History is the memory of the human race. It belongs to all of us. And I don’t trust Google, or anybody, to have control of it. I don’t care how well-intentioned they are, I don’t care if they act in the name of diversity, I don’t care if their fantasy is more comforting than the truth.

Because if there's one lesson I've learned from history, it's that the people who try to erase it, whatever their reasons, are never the good guys.

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