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Scylla Rhiadra

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Everything posted by Scylla Rhiadra

  1. Scylla Rhiadra
    I just did! Good idea. About a quarter of the women showing up were unequivocally women of colour -- 8 out of 36 that appeared at the top of the search? Of those 8, exactly one was an east Asian woman, and two were south Asian. It's important to remember of course that Google uses its own algorithms based on an enormous amount of data about us, so your search results are invariably going to be different from mine. And yeah . . . skin tone, and the perception of skin tone, is complicated.
  2. Scylla Rhiadra
    This is not a new phenomenon, though. From the 1680s through to early decades of the 19th century, the version of Shakespeare's King Lear that held the stage entirely was one rewritten by Nahum Tate with a happy ending, and without the brutal death of Cordelia (or Lear). The reasons for that were a bit more complex than "political correctness," but every age models its own attitudes towards violence, sex, and other sometimes taboo subjects.
  3. Scylla Rhiadra
    Yep. This is one reason I refuse to use "Self Check-Out" at stores. I don't see why the mega-grocery corporation at which I shop should be able to increase its profits by shedding workers, and downloading the work without compensation on to me. Yep again. Chatbots will be, at least for a while, utterly inadequate. But they may be sufficiently adequate that companies decide the savings are worth the occasionally dissatisfied customer.
  4. Scylla Rhiadra
    Well, that's just one application of course. But I disagree that customer service is "just" about "information." It's also about putting out fires, soothing disgruntled customers, finding solutions that solve problems. Even the illusion of talking to a person who is saying "there there, we'll fix this up for you" can make a difference in how a consumer perceives the product or service.
  5. Scylla Rhiadra
    That is indeed terrifying. Even scarier, to my mind, is what text-based AI is likely to do. Amplify misinformation and disinformation, for instance, bury new insights and ideas, and homogenize the complex and sophisticated.
  6. Scylla Rhiadra
    Oh, I agree. I look forward to how utterly banal our already formulaic and banal film industry will become once screenwriters are replaced by ChatGPT. "I want the Barbie Movie . . . but with something other than Barbies." What you've identified is another aspect of taking humans out of the equation, though. The ability to judge intelligently where, for instance, violence is "ok" and where it is not requires human skills: critical thinking, a nuanced understanding of things like genre and context, etc.
  7. Scylla Rhiadra
    Customer service for one thing.
  8. Scylla Rhiadra
    What will be really fun is when AI starts regurgitating its own productions.
  9. Scylla Rhiadra
    I think the point is that AI doesn't "make decisions." It doesn't possess "judgement," yet alone critical thinking skills. People like Ayashe -- and I hope that all of those working on this have her sensitivity and intelligence -- will eventually tweak the algorithms and train it so that it is less likely to do things like that. But AI works on pattern recognition -- and inevitably it is going to reflect the biases of both its programmers and the corpus of material it is mining, which itself exemplifies cultural biases. If asked to find examples of an "attractive woman," the results are going to skew white because there are more instances of white women identified as "attractive" than women of colour.
  10. Scylla Rhiadra
    Read an interesting piece recently about people using AI-generated imaging software to edit or produce profile pics of themselves for professional purposes. The AI was messing with their looks in all sorts of ways, including, most predictably, "whitening" women of colour. "No biases" indeed . . .
  11. Scylla Rhiadra
    I wear a Genus, so this is notoriously a problem.
  12. Scylla Rhiadra
    🙄 This is a test of the Emergency Eye Roll System. In the event of an actual eye-roll emergency, you will be advised on the location of the nearest face-palm and eye-roll GIF.
  13. Scylla Rhiadra
    And even more so in RL. This is the point of dog whistles, no? To produce a kind of plausible deniability ("I didn't actually say that!") using coded language that everyone actually recognizes in a way that will provoke earnest responses that are vulnerable to moderation or manipulation. It's one reason I'll sometimes respond to posts with a 🙄 and nothing else. Because I want to acknowledge the articulation of the point without being baited into a response.
  14. Scylla Rhiadra
    I am totally stealing this.
  15. Scylla Rhiadra
    @Danielle Atheria 's photos are on exhibit now at the QnA Photo Gallery, so I dropped by to have a look tonight. They're really lovely! (Although, CW: some of them are pretty "adult".) Stop by and check them out! It's really worthwhile! http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Tribell Islas/222/97/23
  16. Scylla Rhiadra
    I did, in reference to specific language cited by another poster, which I quoted. I did NOT apply it indiscriminately to anything or anyone else.
  17. Scylla Rhiadra
    That is precisely correct, but the point is that the term has morphed because it was appropriated by Incels and redefined by them. Incel does NOT simply mean "involuntarily celibate" anymore: it is associated with a very highly developed system of values and beliefs, most of them revolving around utterly idiotic pseudo-applications of Darwinism and conspiracy theories. There has been a huge amount written on this subject, much of it by Incels themselves; 5 minutes on Google will demonstrate. Claiming that the term "merely" means unable to get laid is like suggesting that "Proud Boys" are just "boys who are proud." (That's mostly directed at Paul.) This is an absurd and pointless digression that is, moreover, off-topic. I refuse to give more of my time to establishing the meaning and function of a term that is enormously well-documented. It has NOT been applied indiscriminately here, and suggesting that it has is the worst kind of disinformation.
  18. Scylla Rhiadra
    The word was used, so far as I recall, with reference to two very specific cases that employed a language that was characteristic of Incel culture. The actual point of so doing was to differentiate those viewpoints from the entirely legitimate plight of men who are having a hard time finding a match. YOU are the first and only person to apply it indiscriminately.
  19. Scylla Rhiadra
    Oh come on, Paul. Incel is a very specific term that was coined by the culture itself. And it references some very specific beliefs and values, most of them toxic. No one uses the term as an umbrella for all men who are having difficulties finding a partner. And it's very disingenuous to suggest that anyone here has.
  20. Scylla Rhiadra
    Where I live, there was a few years ago a mass killing by a self-identified Incel who did precisely that in a van. He killed 11 people. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/13/toronto-van-murders-court-victim-2018-attack
  21. Scylla Rhiadra
    No one that I've seen here has conflated (as Love correctly observes) Incels with "men who have a problem finding a partner." We have responded to a particular kind of language of male entitlement that is characteristic of that culture. And no, I am not going to be "sympathetic" to a toxic culture that literally argues that men are "owed" sex by women, and that is not infrequently homicidal. Incels have literally killed people in mass shootings and the like, including in my city. Does some research, Paul.
  22. Scylla Rhiadra
    Sometimes you actually scare me, Randall.
  23. Scylla Rhiadra
    Well, by default, all friends are in the "Friend Zone," right? In this instance, it doesn't make any sense, really, to even use that term because there is no one among my friends in SL who isn't in the "Friend Zone." There isn't any other zone into which my acquaintances might belong!
  24. Scylla Rhiadra
    Um . . . why? Because men and women can't enjoy nonsexual relationships? They haven't "applied" for a position because I haven't advertised an opening. I'm not available, they know that, and they're fine with it because *gasp* they might actually value my friendship for reasons that have nothing to do with sex?
  25. Scylla Rhiadra
    Yeah. Beware of people who believe that all self-representation in SL is "role play." It tells you an awful lot about their own approach to personal interactions here.
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