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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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The government is going to make sure that every AI is exactly like Gemini.

How would they do that? The government has limited control over private individuals' local AIs. As for the big corporations, the more they go woke the more it creates both a monetary and an ideological incentive for competitors to offer non-woke AIs. Not only that, but China will probably offer its own AIs that will be politically correct in CCP ways, but not in the US way.

I just saw a motte post from JTarrou saying how we have finally seen "peak woke"... two years ago. Things keep getting worse, people here keep coping, nobody seems to remember anything.

It's possible that we did see peak woke two years ago. Musk owns Twitter now and it's pretty much a Wild West of opinions. 4chan is still chugging along. TheMotte and rDrama got off Reddit. /r/europe is full of open anti-immigrant sentiment. A bunch of highly progressive US city subreddits regularly hate on progressive ideologues for taking things too far when it comes to law enforcement policies. Biden is at least trying to look like he is clamping down on immigration.

Everything happening today would have been considered an impossible joke even two years ago

Two years ago? In 2022? How? Give me an example.

It's possible that we did see peak woke two years ago. Musk owns Twitter now and it's pretty much a Wild West of opinions.

It's a lot better than it was, but it's nowhere near what people are making it out to be. Shadowbanning shenanigans are still afoot over opinions that offensively milquetoast.

Hell, didn't Goody-2 come out less than two weeks before Gemini, and everyone was laughing at the absurdity of an "ethically responsible" chatbot that refused to do arbitrary things? The parody became reality overnight!

Look at the example I edited into the bottom of my OP. A few years ago people were calling that a slippery slope hysteria that would never be a thing, because it was just conservatives exaggerating Some Kids On Tumblr.
In fact, Tracingwoodgrains actually tried to pull the "lol at least we can laugh at conservatives who think Plurals are a thing" gag recently on twitter, and his replies had people going "actually it is and accommodating them is just Basic Human Decency." It happened so fast one end of the leftist tail doesn't even know it's wagging yet!

Canada's bill C-63 is going to criminalize basically all dissent in the country, the UK is... jesus, just look at them. Germany is going to ban its largest party to keep the immigration coming. How are things getting any better?

What are you talking about here? Last time I recall mentioning systems on Twitter it was to marvel at the way some people take the whole thing seriously.

Hell, didn't Goody-2 come out less than two weeks before Gemini, and everyone was laughing at the absurdity of an "ethically responsible" chatbot that refused to do arbitrary things? The parody became reality overnight!

The distance was so close that for a moment I thought it was meant to parody Gemini, and I didn't get the joke. It was surreal.

I think people were laughing at it because it was already kind of true.