Artificial intelligence might be the future, someday — but that doesn’t mean the tool is entirely usable now, Lewis Black of the “Daily Show” said Wednesday night.
While he spoke about the newly relaunched Google AI image generator tool, Black pointed out complaints that the application repeatedly put images of BIPOC into scenarios that didn’t make sense, such as when a Black man or Asian woman was portrayed as a German World War II soldier. He asked, “Why are you trying to show a Black Nazi? Kanye wasn’t alive back then.”
The segment was introduced after Black played two clips of journalists walking through the problems with the tool. “Finally,” Black joked in response, “every time I’m watching a World War II film, I’m thinking, ‘Boy, these Gestapo could use some diversity!’”
“[I] love the idea of a Black George Washington,” he continued. “Imagine a man who’s both the slave and the slave owner. I’m working on the screenplay now.”
“I know, I know,” Black added. “Lin Manuel Miranda already gave us a Black George Washington. So maybe it’s time for something new, like how about … George Washington as a centaur,” he yelled before showing an illustration of the first president of the United States in centaur mode.
“You’re probably thinking, ‘So what if AI can’t remember the past?’ Well, don’t worry — it’s so woke that it’ll also destroy the future,” Black joked.
Now, he added, AI as a whole needs to be “de-woked.” “But where are we gonna find a big enough d—-bag to rein it back in?” Black asked before the segment cut to a clip about Tesla founder Elon Musk’s own AI tool, Grok, which Musk described as an “anti-woke” chatbot.
“Oh goody!” Black exclaimed. “Elon Musk is here to save us. If there’s anyone who can help, it’s the guy who invented cars that blow up!”
The real problem with the AI image generator, Black explained earlier in the segment, is that “when you absorb all of humanity’s knowledge, what you get is, you guessed it, unbelievably racist.”
He then played a clip from “Bloomberg Scoop” in which Francine Lacqua explained that when prompted to produce an image of someone receiving social services, “It generated only non-white and primarily darker-skinned people.” When asked to generate an image of productive people, the results were “uniformly male, majority white and dressed in suits for corporate jobs.”
The tool was also prompted to generate an image of a Latina, which “produced images of women and suggestive poses wearing little to no clothing.”
“AI isn’t a supercomputer, it’s just a horny teenager,” Black crowed.
