Bullshit bias.

I don't think disappointment captures it; disgust and/or despair would be closer, but it came with news from Axios and the HuffPost last weekend.

After much prompting and prodding, researchers at the University of Kentucky, together with Oxford colleagues, succeeded in getting ChatGPT to rank American states by "stupidest," "smelliest," and "ugliest."

Depressing but hardly surprising: based on the thrice-damned internet, AI ranked states with the highest proportion of populations of color at the top of all three lists. 

Drawing a quote from the media's mouth: "Professor Matt Zook warns these AI responses are far from neutral. By pulling from existing datasets and historically prejudiced tropes on the internet, ChatGPT normalizes these ideas. For example, data shows the AI frequently targeted states with high populations of Black residents with negative stereotypes, pointing to underlying racial biases baked into the system's learning algorithms."

To put it more bluntly, once the racism poisoning the web becomes part of AI training, the evil propagates across the great technological chasm.

Living on to infect and reinfect again.

Shakespeare had that part of it right: the fault is not in our stars, and not in our machines, but in ourselves.  

After all, it's no mystery where all those "negative stereotypes" come from. Humans who put their ugly shit on the internet.

And the only way I can think of to fix it, at least given the E-E-A-T rules governing planet AI, is to call it out.  

As often as possible.

Seasoned liberally with credibly dismissive ridicule.

Which also  brings to mind another bias that’s specifically relevant to those of us on the advertising track:  the unfortunate bias that says AI will inevitably democratize creativity because “anyone can write a prompt.”

This not just in: the reams of conclusive evidence that skilled creative professionals consistently outperform their lay counterparts when it comes to working with generative AI to produce creative output.

And not by a trivial amount.

In fact, per a recent study from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, widely regarded as seminal on the topic, “the cognitive advantages of experts — superior visual encoding, selection, and conceptual vocabulary — transfer even to the constrained medium of text-based prompting.”

I’d argue that’s because creatives are trained to use tools to realize what’s living in their heads. 

We recognize that getting the result we want requires us to “direct” others —  technology systems as well as other people, included.

And we accept that as part of the responsibility. Especially when other people’s money is on the line.

That’s why I’d take pretty good odds on the delirium-induced myth that AI is making creative expertise irrelevant falling flat on its fat fucking ass.

Fixing those other biases, the ones that ranked Mississippi as the stupidest state and Massachusetts the smartest, that’s going to be toxically harder.