Technology

I think the interesting thing about this is that these LLMs are essentially like children: they don't have the benefit of years and years of social training to learn our complex set of unspoken rules and exceptions.

Race consciousness is such an ever-present element of our social interactions, and many of us have been habituated not to really notice it. So it's totally understandable to me that LLMs reproduce our highly contradictory set of rules imperfectly.

To be honest, I think that if we can set aside our tendency to understandably avoid these discussions because they're usually instigated by racist trolls, there's some weird and often unexamined social tendencies we can interrogate.

I think it's helpful to remind ourselves frequently that race is real like gender, but not like sex. Race exists because when people encountered new cultures, they invented a pseudoscience to create the concept of whiteness.

Whiteness makes no sense. Who is white is highly subjective, and it's always been associated with the dominant mainstream culture to which whiteness claims ownership. This means that you either buy into the racist falsehood that white culture is interchangeable with the default culture or it has no culture at all.. Whiteness really exists only in opposition to perceived racial inferiority. Fundamentally, that's all "white" means. It's a weird anachronistic euphemism for, "Not racially inferior".

There are plenty of issues with our racial construction of blackness and the quality of being Asian and east Asian and Desi and Indigenous and Latin, but none are quite as fucked up, imo, as the fact that we as a culture attempt to continue to use the concept of "Whiteness" as a non-racist construction. In my thinking, it can be a useful tool for studying the past and studying an unhealthy set of attitudes we're still learning to unlearn. But it's not possible to reform the concept, because it's fundamentally constructed upon beliefs we're trying to discard. If you replace every use of "white" with "not one of the lesser races", then I think you get a better understanding of why it's never going to stop causing problems as long as we try to use it in a non-racist way.

Today, people who were told growing up to view themselves as "white" now feel a frankly understandable sense of grievance and cultural alienation. Because we've begun acting more consistently and recognizing that there's really no benign version of white pride, but we never bothered to teach people to stop thinking of anyone as "white" or taught the people who identify as white to find pride in an actual culture. Midwestern in a culture. Irish is a culture. New Englander is a culture. White has never been a culture. But if we don't ever acknowledge that the entire concept's only value is as a tool to understand racism, it's inevitable that a computer repeating back to us our own attitudes is going to look dumb, inconsistent and either racially biased for or against white people.