Why were users shocked by Google doctrines?
It isn't paranoia for parents, pastors and readers to ask questions about the role of Big Tech in daily life.
I would have written about the Google AI controversies earlier, but #RationalSheep wasn’t open for business at that time. So let’s catch up, a bit.
Let me stress, right up front, that this is not a political post. This is yet another meditation on the media-theory doctrine that “technology shapes content,” as in a stunning amount of the content of our daily lives. Thus, anyone would have to mention Big Tech when talking about the principalities and powers in our world, today.
Once again, ponder those three questions that I asked in the #RationalSheep overture post while proposing a secular definition of “discipleship.” They were: “How do you spend your time? How do you spend your money? How do you make your decisions?”
Can you answer these questions today without running into Big Tech? Of course not.
You could even make a case that this post is not about an individual “signal” from mass culture — an individual movie, book, cable series, news story or another piece of media that addresses an issue that cannot be ignored by the church.
No, this post is — in a way — a comment on part of the technological frame that surrounds all of those media signals. When you talk about Big Tech, you are talking about the powers that be providing the digital air that we breathe, whether we like it or not.
OK, if you need a flashback to the Google AI firestorm, check out this feature from The Economist: “Is Google’s Gemini chatbot woke by accident, or by design? The tech giant’s new artificial-intelligence model invents black Vikings and Asian popes.”
Here is a crucial starting point. In the company’s list of “AI Principles,” Google leaders state:
“AI algorithms and datasets can reflect, reinforce, or reduce unfair biases. We recognize that distinguishing fair from unfair biases is not always simple, and differs across cultures and societies. We will seek to avoid unjust impacts on people, particularly those related to sensitive characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, income, sexual orientation, ability, and political or religious belief.”
In other words, “unfair biases” happen.
This brings us to a must-read feature at The Free Press by Francesca Block and Olivia Reingold.
Read that Google confession about “unfair biases” again and then launch into this chunk of that Free Press article. The company was very, very sorry about all of those bizarre, biased images that lit up the Internet. Google leaders were #ShockedShocked by what they saw. Honest.
In the days after the Gemini debacle, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai sent a memo to staff, calling the tool’s responses around race “unacceptable.” He went on: “Our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That’s why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging AI products.”
And earlier this month, Google co-founder Sergey Brin told a room full of entrepreneurs in San Francisco of Gemini: “We haven’t fully understood why it leans left in many cases. . . that’s not our intention.”
But the ex-staffers we spoke to said they know exactly how the technology became so biased.
“The model is just a reflection of the people who trained it,” one former AI researcher at Google Brain, who asked not to be named, told us. “It’s just a series of decisions that humans have made.”
In other words, there is a moral, cultural, politically and, I would say, theological culture built into this organization. Google produces information consistent with Google-doctrine the way that seminaries tend to produce graduates prepared to preach to members of the seminary’s specific religious faith. Would you expect a Unitarian-Universalist seminary to produce Southern Baptist pastors? No way.
Let’s read on:
Multiple ex-staffers told us they were expected to express their progressive bona fides in the workplace wherever possible.
One former product manager at Google, who left the company in January, said he was forced to attend a session on “Psychological Safety for Inclusive Teams,” where one of his coworkers asked him to update his pronouns from a list of 14 options: she/her, ey/em, zie/hir, ve/ver, he/him, ze/hir, zie/zir, it/its, they/them, ze/zie, xe/xem, any pronoun, name as my pronoun, and “ask me about my pronoun.”
Maguire described working at Google, even in a senior role, “like being in an authoritarian country where only certain views and people were accepted.”
“I walked around every day at work policing my own actions and language,” he said.
There is so much to learn in that Free Press piece. Read it all.
Now, think of all the ways that Google World shapes the information that influences how you spend your time, how you spend your money and how you make your decisions.
Does this mean that readers of this newsletter should stop using Google products? Personally, I have no idea how I would do that.
But does this mean that believers need to be careful in Google World? Yes. Should pastors, parents, teachers and others discuss this reality with their parishioners, children and students? I would say, “Yes,” if the goal is to live as Rational Sheep.
Let’s end (for now) with a parable from a friend of mine.
If you have read Rod “Live Not By Lies” Dreher for several decades, as I have, you know that he is not afraid to note the warning flags waving in mass culture. That includes the world of Big Tech and the products produced by the mass media that are forced to embrace Internet strategies in order to survive after the death of traditional advertising (click here for my Religion & Liberty essay on that painful topic).
What happens when Google World begins shaping the doctrines of a major magazine?
Public attitudes about health are an issue that will shape the lives of people in pews, as well as the lives of their friends, family, teachers, lawyers, doctors, etc. So here is a Dreher Substack take on the new normal at a magazine that he once considered, well, normal:
If you had been an emissary from 2024, and traveled back in time to 1996 to tell me that this is how it was going to be between men and women in the West, I would have thought that we had well and truly morally collapsed. And yet … here we are. … I had a sense the other day of what things were like when, googling to find out more information about that story I posted here the other day — the one about the Brooklyn sex commune where people complain that consent was violated — I came across this 2021 Men’s Health story about a sex party at the commune.
Silly me — back in the 1990s, I wrote a story for that magazine, and thought it was a normal, mainstream men’s health magazine. That piece, though, written by its bisexual sex columnist, author of a book called BoySlut, reads like one of those lurid Penthouse Letters that teenage guys in my generation used to read clandestinely in dirty magazines. But this is a completely mainstream health magazine today! What was considered pornography a generation ago is normal discourse today.
But hey … Everything’s Fine™.
Should believers stop reading all mainstream media? How would you do that? Should believers carefully follow trustworthy scribes who point them toward on-the-record information that helps them understand what is happening in the culture and, thus, in their own lives? Yes. That is one of the primary goals of the Rational Sheep project.
For insights into that process, see this GetReligion post from last summer: “After 303 Creative — Can readers find Twitter voices (hello David French) that help us think?” Here is a byte of that:
… This is a post that I was requested to write after a recent luncheon with clergy, students, faculty and others at the Overby Center at Ole Miss. We kept coming back to a crucial question for news consumers: How do we find a compelling mix of news and commentary — representing different points of view — in an age in which most newsrooms embrace business models in which they tell paying customers exactly what they want to hear?
Here is another way of stating that: How do we find news and commentary that help us understand the views of people that we need to respect (or at the very least truly tolerate), even when we disagree with them?
Will this be easy to do? No way.
But we must try, so let’s work together on that. Hang in there.
FIRST IMAGE: Goolag t-shirt for sale at Amazon.com