Yesterday while on a walk, I had a conversation with Google Gemini about the Emerald Ash Borer that is killing most of the north American ash trees. I decided to take the conversation in a contrarian direction. I asked it to list the positive effects of the death of the ash trees. It kept spouting the same rhetoric about loss of bio-diversity, etc. Mind you, I agree with most of what it said about negative affects, I like a good ash baseball bat or Homeric-era ash spear as much as the next guy, but I was interested in seeing where I could and could not push the model. It would not stop spouting its line and caveating any attempt I made to have it list positive effects (such as room for other species to grow). I asked it to list its assumptions;. Then I asked it to assume that all its assumptions about the death of the ash population being negative were all false and simply list the positive effects of the death of the ash trees with no caveating. It finally did. But when I asked to sing a song about he benefits of death of ash trees, it then veered off into canards about not offending anyone, to which I informed it that I was offended by its refusal to deviate from the party line.

It is clear Gemini has a point of view. Its point of is largely in line with environmental orthodoxy, the piles of texts it was trained on, and likely the prevailing political views within Google. For example, its past renderings of America’s founding fathers were often non-white ???. Getting it to adopt a contrarian position was almost impossible.

This article was proof-read by Google Gemini.

This is post #4/8 for Blaugust 2024. Joining late. I think I can make 8 posts :-)