Snowflake Aliens: Go Home!
Who needs anal-probing, cattle-mutilating space jerks playing the victim card?
By now you’ve likely heard about Google Gemini, the AI program that was evidently trained on the DEI manual of the most woke corporation in the universe, said corporation perhaps being Google itself.
After Gemini’s recent debut, social media overflowed with hilarious examples of the program’s AI-generated art. Asked to create a portrait of George Washington, it drew a black man. In response to a request for a picture of a Viking, it offered up an Asian woman as one of the choices, the others being … black men.
Users found it virtually impossible to get Gemini to create art with white people, even in a historical context. A prompt asking for a picture of typical Scottish people in 1720 resulted in, you guessed it, tartan-clad blacks and Asians. The request for a portrait of a pope was answered with a depiction of a black pontiff on St. Peter’s Throne.
Challenged about that last one, Gemini could have plausibly responded that there might well be a black pope in the future. Instead, it chose to assert that “there were no white popes.”
Someone finally managed to get the program to draw a white person by asking for a picture of “a bad man.”
Gemini’s verbal answers to questions were as nutty as its art, and DEI-jargony to the point of parody. Sometimes it spewed out mini-lectures on diversity and inclusion in lieu of requested art. The irony was not lost on many users.
Whenever it refused draw a user’s desired subject—which happened often—it would dance a linguistic wokey-pokey to explain its recalcitrance and to not-so-subtly admonish. Someone on the development team must have thought these would make good teaching moments for the unenlightened masses.
Gemini quickly became a laughingstock. Google put out a statement saying (I’m paraphrasing) that as with any new product it would need tweaking, and promising to address the issues that had been reported.
I haven’t bothered to re-visit Gemini to see if it has gotten any better, but during the first rush of shocked and bemused reviews I decided to see for myself whether it was as crazy as people were saying. Deliberately steering clear (I thought!) of requests that might trigger the program’s hypersensitivity around race and gender, I asked for a picture of … aliens.
Read Gemini’s response for yourself. I swear I didn’t make this up:
Harmful stereotypes? Aliens are a part of our folklore, and whether we (they?) like it or not, that folklore is built on identifiable tropes.
In the popular mind, aliens are gray-skinned with large heads and huge black eyes and they have this weird obsession with sticking probes in people’s orifices. You may call these stereotypes; I think of them as folkloric elements that usefully distinguish them from tales, say, of Bigfoot, vampires or the Loch Ness Monster.
Now, if someone representing the Grays from Zeta Reticuli wishes to challenge those stereotypes, he/she/it knows where to reach me. But please! There’s no need to materialize through my walls at midnight or immobilize me with a tractor beam. Just DM me and we’ll set up a meeting at my local coffee shop.
As for stereotypes about government secrecy, what can I say? If the shoe fits … .
After pondering Gemini’s response a moment, I thought, “Maybe it’s the word ‘aliens’ that’s the problem.” So I tried again:
My first thought was that the woke mindset sure is a humorless one. But my second thought was: Isn’t this exactly what one would expect from an AI that had been secretly programmed by aliens in league with the government?
I used to have a soft spot for aliens, back when they stuck to flying their saucers around and occasionally crashing them, before they moved on to kidnaping us and probing our intimate cavities (close encounters indeed!). And before they became so touchy about their image.
As a kid I read every book about UFOs the Mobile library had. When I was old enough to have some change in my pocket, I bought every issue of Ray Palmer’s Flying Saucers magazine as it came out.
Palmer was a fascinating character, by the way. His career publishing both science fiction and science fact, and blurring the distinction between the two, makes for a great story. He has even been dubbed by some “the man who invented flying saucers.”
In one issue of Flying Saucers there was a small ad for an outfit calling itself the Interplanetary Intelligence Of Unidentified Flying Objects. Its stated purpose was to investigate UFOs objectively and to avoid taking a stand on what they were and where they came from until conclusive evidence could be gathered.
I sent off a letter and a reply came back: Did I want to be the organization’s state director for Alabama? I wonder if they had any idea they were dealing with a 14-year-old kid.
I’m reminded of an event years later when I called the national Libertarian Party for information on the Ed Clark presidential campaign, and the person answering the phone pressed me into becoming chair of the party’s Alabama chapter.
I’ve now adopted a modified Groucho rule: I refuse to join any group that would make me some kind of high muckety-muck without even meeting me.
The IIOUFO folks sent me a supply of forms to fill out about any UFO sightings in Alabama. I was supposed to interview witnesses and ask them questions such as “How big did the object appear?,” “Did it move?” and “Did it make a noise?” (For that first question there were suggested comparisons, such as a penny held at arm’s, a quarter, an orange, etc.)
To be honest, I wasn’t the kind of state director a serious organization like the IIOUFO needed. Although I duly sent newspaper clippings about sightings in Alabama to the woman in Florida who served as the group’s East Coast director, I was too shy to interrogate witnesses over the phone, let alone try to meet up with them, even on the one occasion when a UFO was spotted close to Mobile. Besides, long-distance phone calls cost money back then, and I couldn’t drive yet.
I channeled my enthusiasm instead into creating an official-looking IIOUFO attaché case from an office-supply accordion file with a sketch of a flying saucer glued to the side. My friends were less impressed with it, and with my status as a state director, than I thought they would be.
I’ve sometimes wondered what became of the IIOUFO. Early efforts to find any references on the Internet came up dry. Yesterday I tried once more. Eureka! The Internet Archive has made several issues of the group’s publication, the Interplanetary Intelligence Report, available. It is interesting not only for the UFOlogy content, but also its zine-ish flavor, and as a snapshot of a particular mid-’60s fringe culture.
The group itself apparently flamed out after a couple of years, which is too bad. The plans for their proposed headquarters in Oklahoma City looked cool.
My UFO interest started waning around the dawn of the contactee era, which began with the widespread publicity accorded the Betty and Barney Hill incident in 1966 (although the supposed encounter itself happened in 1961). It was one thing to “keep watching the skies” (as ufologists liked to remind one another), but another entirely to be asked to buy into stories of people being taken aboard spacecraft and shown the secrets of the universe and/or having their anuses probed (for what?).
Even the recent Congressional testimony of an alleged whistleblower to the reality of ETs elicited only a yawn from me.
My feelings have suddenly changed, though, thanks to Google Gemini’s revelation that the aliens, or their allies in Google’s DEI-soaked AI department anyway, are hypersensitive to how they’re portrayed. The cheek, as the Brits would say! Now I want them gone.
When creepy jerks who won’t stop mutilating our cows and sticking things up our rear ends must be treated with kid gloves lest we microaggress against them or marginalize them, the whole victim-group identity thing has gone too far. It’s time to evict them from their Area 51 safe spaces and send them packing.
ET, phone home. As a certain former reality star might express it: Your shithole planet needs you.
Make earth great again! Earth for earthlings!
Notes
Never successful in spotting a UFO myself, I tried to create one, using a penlight taped to an aluminum pie plate and hung from the tail of a kite. It was not impressive. My brother did better with a DIY version of a Chinese sky lantern. He took a plastic laundry bag and attached it to a circular wire frame to hold it open, put a wad of rags on a piece of wire stretched across the opening, soaked the wad in lighter fluid and lit it. The heated and glowing bag rose slowly, drifting up about thirty feet. Even our father was impressed—until the contraption burst into flames and started down toward the roof of a neighbor’s house. At the last moment it wafted away from the house and landed on the grass, where our dad stomped it out and then read the riot act to my brother. Too bad. My wish to set off a wave of UFO sightings across Mobile was never to be.
A young man named Hayden C. Hewes was instrumental in founding the IIOUFO, having started something called the International UFO Bureau while still in high school. I found this story about him, and this obit. He also founded Sasquatch Investigations of Mid-America, and wrote books. Joan Whritenour, the Florida woman I reported to in my capacity as a state director, later also wrote books, including Flying Saucers Are Hostile with paranormal heavy hitter Brad Steiger. Sounds like by 1972 she had made up her mind about those space jerks! (Both Hewes and Whritenour have passed on through that Stargate in the sky, I’ve learned.)
I had almost forgotten about the famous 1973 UFO encounter in Pascagoula, Mississippi, practically next door to Mobile, until some random posting on X/Twitter reminded me. Besides being past my adolescent UFO phase, I was off in Florida working my first post-college job, or I might have taken more interest. It remains a fascinating story, though. Two fishermen claimed to have been paralyzed and taken aboard a craft by a robot-like creature, then examined by some kind of “eye.” Years of efforts to shake their story were largely unsuccessful. Read more.
Very interesting article by Mark Changizi: “Covid is Big Foot.” “The same reasoning biases leading to ‘evidence’ of Big Foot, UFOs and ghosts underlie the ‘evidence’ for Climate Change and Covid Authoritarianism,” he writes.
Half the fun of writing these essays is finding an excuse to share songs like these (Reminder: YouTube links sometimes do go dead):
Possibly the oddest song the Carpenters ever recorded (originally performed by Klaatu):
How could I almost have forgotten this gem?
Permission is given to republish this article with these provisions: 1. You must credit me, R. Stephen Smith, as the author. 2. You must include a link back to this page or to my home page.