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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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And yet "Attempted assassination of" gives me Donald Trump as the first results.

I think people try to do too much Kremlinology on Google results. I believe Google engineers might sometimes try to manipulate results for political ends, but most claims I see are like this: dumb, inconsistent, and more plausibly the result of the same phenomenon that causes Dall-E to draw a house with a chimney no matter how many ways I try to specify "No chimney."

I would have to believe some low level engineer is just arbitrarily hacking specific query phrases. Which is not... impossible, but seems unlikely in a number of ways.

I believe Google engineers might sometimes try to manipulate results for political ends, but most claims I see are like this: dumb, inconsistent, and more plausibly the result of the same phenomenon that causes Dall-E to draw a house with a chimney no matter how many ways I try to specify "No chimney."

Are you pretending not to notice again? Dall-E does that because CNNs are bad at decomposition and nobody invented any better. What Google does is intentional, go to Yandex or any search engine which is outside of america's culture war and you immediately get suggested prompts for attack on Trump

You don't get your house without chimney or headless horseman or car without wheels just by going to another's brand of AI gen.

I get Ronald Reagan, Bob Marley, and Theodore Roosevelt.

"Attempted assassination of d" gives "de gaulle" and "franklin d roosevelt" and nobody else.

Anything more specific gives nothing whatsoever.

Note that Google is known to blacklist words and phrases from autocomplete, at least on a crude level, so it wouldn't be surprising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#Search_suggestions

Same here as the other commenter: Ronald Reagan, Robert Fico, Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, the Pope, Bob Marley, Truman, Seward, Reagan, President Reagan.

Do you still get Trump if you try it now?

See my eta above.

The top results now seem to be news stories about Trump being omitted from search results.

And yet "Attempted assassination of" gives me Donald Trump as the first results.

Not me. I get Prince Alfred, then Ronald Reagan, Arthur Calwell, Robert Fico, Queen Victoria, the Pope, etc, etc. Trump nowhere on the list.

How is this Kremonology? You saw what they did to their AI image generation. At this point the default assumption is Google has their finger on the scale