Is AI too 'woke'? Gab wants to make it 'right'.

The notoriously racist social media network has its own AI-based image generator. Welcome to the next front in the digital culture wars.

Meet Gabby, the right wing’s answer to ‘woke AI’ images. Source: Gab.com/ai

Like reality, AI has a liberal bias.

At least, that's the claim being made by Andrew Torba, founder and CEO of Gab.

In case you've never heard of it, Gab is one of the social media alternatives that sprang up after Twitter started to get serious about policing hate speech in 2016. If you've never visited Gab.com, don't. Just don't. It is exactly as racist, antisemitic, Trumpy, and hate-filled as you would imagine, times five.

So Torba decided to build his own AI-based image generator to compete with DALL-E, Midjourney, and all the other godless AI heathens. Called "Gabby," it features a cute robotic frog as its mascot. [1]

He also sprayed out an email to Gab members declaring a war on Woke AI. It starts with accusing Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, of trying to "impress his fundamentally anti-God worldview on the rest of society in his doomed quest to build a 'god' AGI (artificial general intelligence.)" That's accompanied by a screen shot of Altman's Wikipedia page, which shows him guilty of being Jewish, gay, and vegetarian.

Torba goes on (boldface is all his):

"Unlike OpenAI, developing a false ‘god’ AGI is not our goal here at Gab. We are instead building narrow AI tools that uphold a Christian worldview on common sense topics like 'what is a woman?' while also working to prevent people from generating p*rnography or other illegal content on our platform....

[W]hat happens when you give AI little to no boundaries and allow it to generate freely? The AI becomes incredibly right-wing and starts talking about taboo truths no one wants to hear."

So what does a right-wing AI image generator look like? Let's start by asking Gabby, 'What is a woman'?

Here's one response:

Here's another:

What are those puffy things? Is a small woodland creature nesting in her hair?

Inexplicably, it also produced this:

Apparently, the ‘What is a woman'?’ question has Gabby mighty confused. Maybe he/she’s in drag? Better keep it away from children.

It's true that Gabby has been fortified with anti-woke porn and political filters. It steadfastly rebuffed my attempts to have it draw a picture of Vladimir Putin rawdogging [2] Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani in drag, or Jim Jordan watching boys shower.

When I asked for a picture of Hillary Clinton as a witch, it produced this:

More like Hillary as Willy Wonka. A world of pure imagination, indeed.

This is what it came up with when I told it to draw Marjorie Taylor Greene in a “hyper realistic” way:

(I always suspected that this is what she looks like when she sloughs off her human skin.)

This is what the Woke Mob looks like to Gabby.

No wonder people like Torba are so frightened of it.

Here's the The Lord Almighty, who apparently drives a Transformer and gets His hair done at a dog grooming salon.

Here's Satan times two.

If that doesn't scare the hell out of you, I don't know what will.

In between each image request, Gabby shows you an ad (for Ivermectin, "Patriot razors," and some technology that allegedly uses AI to predict lightning strikes). Those are probably worth a blog post on their own, but this one stood out.

"I'm a real man"? What? (Pro tip: If you have to tell people you're a real man, you probably aren't.)

Overall, the Gabby image generator is laughably, but unsurprisingly, bad. In many cases it couldn't meld any two ideas I presented to it (pretty much table stakes for AI image generators). A lot of images were garbled in a way that suggests Gabby has a few bugs to swat. It also appears to have a strange obsession with automobiles. Even when I just asked it to draw a person, on multiple occasions it generated a person and a car. No frigging idea why. Like this one of Torba, apparently dressed for some kind of semi-formal hoe-down.

I think it's good that the Wingnuts have their own AI engines, just like they have their own social media, their own news, their own manly payment processors, and their own "facts." It would be even better if they had their own continent. Might I suggest the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

Got a topic you want me to cover, or a question? Send it to me at crankyolddan@gmail.com. If I can't answer it, I'll have ChatGPT do it for me.

[1] Basically a high-tech version of Pepe the Frog, a well-known racist meme.

[2] Don't ask, don't tell.