My Sadness of Mumbo Jumbo (Artificial Intelligence)
So, I was thinking while reading Mumbo Jumbo, as most people tend to, and something really intriguing passed through my mind: the entire Talking Android plot would have been cooler in the age of social media. I would say that Hinckle Von Vampton's plan did not go very well, largely because of his inability to create a sufficient Talking Android. I would presume that, if Facebook or Instagram were to have existed at the time, this task would have been much simpler and effective. Given that there were numerous officials who did in fact believe that Hubert "Safecracker" Gould was actually a prominent black poet, there would undoubtedly be many more online who would have fallen prey to these lies. Papa LaBas would have a much more difficult job unearthing the falsities proposed over the Internet, and it would have been easier to spread the message to discredit Jes Grew.
Hinckle Von Vampton, if he could have figured out how to create any sort of social media account, would have a much easier task on hand for creating a Talking Android. His largest struggle in this book seemed to be his difficulty in procuring a Talking Android. The best people that he had available for the job were not of the skin complexion that he so needed to discredit Jes Grew from within the black community. He took a likening to Woodrow Wilson Jefferson, but "he's too black," and so he turned to using skin lightener cream (140). This attempt goes poorly for Hinckle Von Vampton, as he ends up slugged "with a fist that has toted many a grain sack and tamed many a horse. Hinckle kind of floats to the rug, out cold" (142). If Hinckle were to have maintained an online presence, he could have done it from a much safer distance out of harm's way, as people who may have disagreed with him would not have the opportunity to reach through the computer screen to punch him.
Further, Hinckle's second attempt at fooling the general populace is to dress Hubert "Safecracker" Gould up in blackface. This goes poorly, as it is easily exposed when LaBas grazes "a quick finger across his face, leaving a white streak. He then displays the black paint on his finger to the audience" (160). In an online setting, this change of skin color would not have been needed, as you could simply catfish people. This point also applies to if Woodrow Wilson Jefferson were to become the Talking Android as well. If the only picture shown is that of the profile picture of the writer, and that picture can be easily doctored, then how would anyone ever learn that the writer is not of the community they claim to descend from? If anyone were to decry him as a fraud, Hinckle could have called him a troll and blocked him, maybe even paying for followers to further boost his validity.
An interesting thing I thought of whilst contemplating this blog was the question of what were to happen if Hinckle had access to generative AI for his magazine. I think it is truly scary what Hinckle could have achieved. This would have removed the requirement for Hinckle and Hubert "Safecracker" Gould to have collected information on the black vernacular in the manner they did and would have made more believable pieces. Personally, I did not find Hubert "Safecracker" Gould's poetry to be very reminiscent of the Harlem Renaissance pieces of the time. Depending on your opinion on the strength of AI in writing essays, you may believe that a skilled AI robot could have better infiltrated the black artists of the time and done a better job of subliminally passing along the anti-Jes Grew narrative without being so blunt and discordant with similar art of the time. This would have truly transformed Hinckle's idea of the Talking Android into a true talking android.
It is really truly terrifying of the ability that a real-life Hinckle Von Vampton could truly achieve in this modern time. Given the tools of our generation that we now possess, the ability to pass information near instantaneously can be quite dangerous if purposely used maliciously. I think this story could certainly be used as a tale of how aware we sometimes have to be in our society, and that we cannot trust everything as it is told to us. If Mumbo Jumbo were set 100 years later, I think that the plot would have played out in an interesting way, although it is possible that little would have changed. Jes Grew went away regardless, however if there were to be a perpetual Talking Android ran by a true talking android, I do believe that there would be little chance of Jes Grew ever returning, and I do not believe that this is a good thing. Anyways, this is just something small that I thought of while reading this book and thought I might share with everyone, what do you think?
I think you raise some good points about some of the modern critiques of AI as well as the dangers of what AI can do when it is trying imitate (or replace) human beings. Much of the modern reisstance to AI surrounds the fear that the new generation will lose its genuinity and creativity and leave everything in these realms up to tehcnoloogy going forward within these roles. This is a valid concern, but in its current state, I don't think AI is capable of replicating human art forms to the extent that it would require to convince others that it can fit within an artistic movement. For the most part, there are subtle cues about the work that AI does, maybe that it inherently lacks some human quality or sense of soul within its creations or that they all derive from something created by an algorithm that can make them easy to spot as artificial. However, I'm sure that as AI continues to improve, the prospect of Hinckle Von Hampton having access to AI becomes increasingly more dangerous in terms of potential for cultural destruction and infiltration.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Kelby that AI as it currently stands would lack the soul and clarity of a true person, but since AI and social media are constantly progressing and improving day by day, I also agree that Hinckle's plan would absolutely go from cartoonishly bad and silly to something that might prove to be a genuine threat. Just being online in general already provides a layer of anonymity. It's basically guaranteed that everyone on the internet is not 100% who they say they are. Everyone that isn't inside Gould and Hinckle's circle won't exactly know who he is, even if he wasn't masquerading/catfishing someone's identity. That also brings up deepfaking people and how he could easily deepfake a person to push an Atonist agenda. Then, the ability to """create""" art forms like writing and painting by just typing a prompt in ChatGPT, which mishmashes together a bunch of pre-existing works into one conglomerate would make his job all the more easier and probably a nightmare to decode and unveil. I really like thinking about the idea of how a modern "talking android," would work, nice blog!
ReplyDeleteThe image of an android instantly brings up the impression of a semi-robotic human impersonation, exactly what Ishmael Reed had in mind for the Talking Android. While most of us are still able to differentiate generated opinion from human thought, I also see a lot of "talking android" in the way that news sites will take quotes and stories out of context to give them more shock/engagement value, thus helping them get picked up by algorithms to show to more people. Additionally, many news companies are starting to use generated context for simpler stories (Sports Illustrated had a fiasco with this in the fall), so I think Talking Androids are closer than we may think. Interesting post.
ReplyDeleteThis is a fascinating topic to contemplate--AI in the hands of the Wallflower Order could be dangerous indeed, especially with the advent of AI-generated video as "evidence" of historical "fact." I think of a number of analogies in present social-media culture--like the one white Republican politician who tried to post from a fake Twitter account and opened his statement with "As a black man I believe . . ." or something, but he forgot to switch accounts and posted it from his white-dude official account (busted!). But the AI context reminds me of the recent "photos" being distributed around "Truth Social" featuring images of the former president with "Black voters"--all with deranged smiles, suspiciously tidy backgrounds, and sometimes three arms or seven fingers on a hand. There is a narrative in the media currently about the allegedly high degree of support for Trump among Black and Hispanic voters--and here we see crude AI-generated images as "evidence" of this supposed trend. It's not hard to see the fingerprints of the Wallflower Order here, if we view the events through "Reed glasses."
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point on how people can hide behind the internet. What I find concerning is the lack of fact checking on the internet. In this environment, I feel like a talking android is much more feasible. I've seen this in the PragerU ads that I would get often. The fact that they can brand themselves a university is definitely peculiar. In all the ads that I got for PragerU, they were all wearing suits to make themselves seem more fact driven. This also reminds me of Dead Internet Theory, where the theory believes that most of the online population are bots that try to spew their agenda.
ReplyDeleteIn the story, the Wallflower Order possessed technology decades ahead of its time, which sounds pretty terrifying when applied to our world today. Decades from now, seeing the recent speed of technological advancement, machine learning and computational power will be so advanced and refined beyond our current iterations; with this sort of power, the Wallflower Order would already have been using Talking Androids to mislead people on the internet for years, without anyone even noticing. It sounds like a crazy idea, but it's impossible to prove or disprove.
ReplyDeleteI think your point is related to how easy it is to spread misinformation---both AI and non-AI generated---on the internet. The Wallflower Order especially would be able to spread propaganda across numerous mediums with the modern internet, which they could definitely use to target biased, easily manipulated individuals (I think of older Americans in particular). This sort of thing already sort of exists with Q-Anon, and I believe deepfakes have also made it easier to spread conspiracy theories around certain political beliefs/figures.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that today it would be possible to create a literal "talking android" pretty easily, even if it would be far from perfect. Current ai technology is only going to get better, though I do think that there's a possibility that popular culture could outpace the ability of ai to recognize and use it, since I think right now they usually just do a broad sweep of the internet for datasets. Even without using ai though, social media alone would probably be enough for someone to be like a talking android and it's already proved to be pretty good for spreading misinformation.
ReplyDeleteSocial media has shown its potential to be used by those aiming to keep people down and suppress change, but it also constantly used to spread new ideas and organize against the status quo. I think that talking android could easily be seen as the millions of trolls online pretending to be someone else so that they can bring people down. At the same time I think that if the internet existed in the time of Mumbo Jumbo it would have hastened the spread of jes grew. Jes grew isn't a physical disease so it would've been able to spread across the US faster than it did in the book. I think that if you look at the internet through this lense it's important to consider the positive and negative impacts of such rapid and anonymous information sharing.
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