Alan Rickman Looked Like Dylan Moran, According To Google
Alan Rickman Looked Like Dylan Moran, According To Google
Filed under: ominous electrons
According to Google, the first Google Doodle was created in 1998, when their motto was “Don’t Be Evil.” This could be true, or it could just be the story Google has made up about themselves and told us by way of their own algorithm sorting out the true story from view. Uncertainty exists because Google’s motto has changed, and their algorithms are not just profitable, but ideological.
Today’s Google Doodle benchmark is the worst drawing of Alan Rickman ever. The memory of the late character actor has been insulted by substituting a bad image of alleged comedian Dylan Moran for Rickman and telling billions of users this is what Rickman looked like.
Everyone is wondering about AI these days. I am old enough to remember reading articles in Omni magazine about the threat to humanity that artificial intelligence supposedly represented. As I recall, it was roughly the same time that James Cameron portrayed AI genociding humanity in The Terminator. Rickman was not a household name until he played the iconic villain in Die Hard four years later.
That is how long I have waited for the AI apocalypse amid breathless expectation. Forgive me if I just don’t feel the sense of urgency about it that I am supposed to. An artificial intelligence is no more capable of evil than an artificial limb or an artifical flavoring or any other artifice of technology.
People are evil. People do evil things. Give an evil person a ham sandwich and they will use it to do evil. Give them AI and they will do evil with it.
What ideology does a shitty drawing of Alan Rickman serve? I can only imagine one. It is the system of ideas in which AI is the future, our Big Tech overlords are the new gods, and the state exists in a symbiotic relationship of power through control of information. Gee, that sounds like now.
Perhaps we are supposed to get upset about bad drawings of Alan Rickman. Maybe Google is now choosing bad art on purpose, to prepare us for the AI takeover of all creative industries. It is possible that AI-created Google Doodles will start appearing soon, and that they will be better than this crap, so that we start to regard AI as not just normal, but better than human-made artwork.
How long before AI-generated “artwork” is hanging in galleries and selling at Van Gogh prices with screaming infants wearing Just Stop Oil onesies glued to the glass?
Kidding aside, anyone selling you on a critical need for “safer AI” is trying to own you with it. Artificial intelligence will not choose how it is used, humans will do that, and we must beware the humans who claim that they alone understand the threat. Anti-AI hysterics is not about science. It is the call of the magician selling his spells. Trust your humanity and don’t be fooled. If you have to hover your cursor over the drawing of Alan Rickman to know who the doodle is supposed to be, then a human has failed. Maybe on purpose, maybe not, but a human nonetheless.