Google’s new AI app erases white people

By now, most of you have probably seen the preposterous images generated by Google’s new AI conversation app, Gemini. Admitting to “missing the mark,” Google has withdrawn the image generator for tweaking, but not before the bot revealed an aversion to white people that was plainly cultivated by its overlords. Users discovered it was nearly impossible to prompt Gemini to produce pictures of ethnic Europeans, especially white men. Douglas Murray is right to object that the word is misused, but then I can misuse it, too. This is digital genocide!

Those hilarious AI images have caught the sanctimonious social engineers with their pants down

I haven’t had such a good laugh in ages. Ask for pics of Vikings, get ferocious black Vikings — and ferocious black female warriors, since those rapists and pillagers were famously intent on closing the gender pay gap. Ask for pics of a pope, get a black pope or a black female pope. Ask for pics of 1943 German soldiers, get Asian Nazis, female Nazis and black Nazis, as if Jesse Owens no sooner defied Hitler’s racist ideology in the 1936 Olympics than joined the SS. Prompted to produce portraits of the Founding Fathers, Gemini generated a Native American, an Asian and two black men in white wigs, who surprisingly helped write a constitution that counted “a person who looks like them” as three-fifths of a human being. Gemini’s George Washington is black. I got my biggest belly laugh from the very artificially intelligent version of “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” whose signature jewelry leaps from the composition because the model’s complexion is black.

Factual deceit is less amusing. One user asked Gemini whether it was true that more than half of American homicides are committed by black people, who constitute only 13 percent of the population. The incensed bot proclaimed that of course it wasn’t true! Yet buried in its long, hectoring diatribe about the wickedness of racial stereotyping and discrimination? Black Americans account for 53 percent of homicide offenders (and victims).

Those hilarious AI images have caught the sanctimonious social engineers of Silicon Valley with their pants down. Intoxicated by “diversity,” our technological betters are bent on imposing their all-minority utopia on both the past and the present. This gotcha moment would merely be cause for a chortle if it weren’t indicative of what progressives have been up to for quite some time.

While 82 percent of England and Wales is white, and 95 percent of Scotland is white, British television adverts are replete with black actors, though only 4 percent of the country is black (a statistic that shocks Londoners). In the US, which is 59 percent white, the over-representation of the “under-represented” in commercials is more drastic still. TV news presenters in both countries are ostentatiously ultra-diverse. Having formerly catered to what was until recently a white super-majority, programming now elaborately overcompensates, verisimilitude be damned. Many a British murder mystery is set in a poky English village, but these days the real mystery is how these quaint, underpopulated rural outposts attract all those black people and why their police detectives are so reliably black women.

Incessant media fun-house mirroring of western populations as diverse, diverse, and nothing but diverse is a form of gaslighting (to use the left’s favorite metaphor). White people are meant to think, Gosh, I thought there were more of us than that. Sorry, I must have been crazy, my mistake. The gaslighting even emerges in left-wing vernacular, from which the word “minority” has been expunged. Instead, we have the “minoritized,” as if racial and ethnic groups who’d otherwise have constituted the vast preponderance of a western country’s population have been shrunk by a white-supremacist death ray. Lately, progressives relish citing the non-white “global majority,” with the implication that whites are hopelessly outnumbered even in nations historically European, and they might as well capitulate to their own irrelevance.

Not content with solely distorting the present, activist artists and academics have been busy scribbling over images of the past, effectively imposing retroactive blackface. As a one-off, all those non-white founders in Hamilton made for a jubilant and creatively fruitful musical. It’s no one-off. In the remake, the Little Mermaid is black. Bridgerton’s Regency aristocracy is half-black. As of 2021, Anne Boleyn is black. The film Chevalier resurrects an eighteenth-century musical mediocrity as the “black Mozart.” Anything-but-colorblind casting erases and replaces in only one direction. For most of history, the population in the “systemically racist” west included few non-whites to be racist towards. Yet under the influence of the media’s DEI delirium, younger folks parrot the shibboleth that the US, the UK and others have “always been a nation of immigrants,” in flagrant defiance of the facts.

University reading lists are decolonized — more accurately, colonized — and the West’s cultural pantheon is reshaped into a teaching-the-world-to-sing Coca-Cola ad. “Indigenous ways of knowing” are included in hard science curricula, and tribal mythology is put on a par with the discovery of penicillin. Source of all evil, “whiteness” must be “decentered.” Classics departments dwindle because Roman and Greek antiquity was “too white.”

This frantic revisionism must spring from embarrassment. It’s a matter of considerable inconvenience for anti-western westerners that the abundance of recent human advancement — in science, medicine, technology — has been made by those horrible white people. The enduring titans of the arts, philosophy and literature are dead white males: Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt; Beethoven, Bach, Mahler; Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard; Tolstoy, Dickens, Flaubert. No amount of playing God at Google can efface the disproportionate achievements of European civilization and its diaspora — which, as I’ve argued before, belong to everyone. While modern-day white folks can’t take personal credit for all those achievements, Notre Dame shouldn’t be a source of shame.

The technoweenies’ paternalistic efforts to induce our moral improvement expose them as propagandists and liars. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley’s manipulation of the US electorate in the run-up to November won’t be as clumsy or obvious as Gemini, and it certainly won’t be as funny.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.