Computer Says Maybe

Alix: [00:00:00] Hey friends, Alix Dunn here, and maybe you like me, have been interested in the apartheid pickled brain of Elon Musk and all of the ways that he's trying to make a large language model that will reinforce his petty politics and his eugenics and his. Just bizarre understanding of history and race and also his sort of political project writ large.

Alix: So I reached out to my friend Nic Dawes, who his day job is running the city, which is a pretty small but awesome publication in New York City. If you live in New York, you should check it out. Definitely. You probably already. Hopefully for subscribers, but he is also a South African who is the same age roughly as Musk, and he has been kind of melting down over some of the grok developments, and so he and I have been chatting for a while about what it might mean, what it tells us about our current information [00:01:00] environments.

Alix: And just generally like what the politics all might portend. So we wanted to have him on for a short to talk specifically about that. Besides Grok. Um, Nic and I have also been talking a lot about AI and media, particularly the business models around media as it negotiates its demise in relation to AI systems.

Alix: So we have a longer form episode about that coming out in the next few weeks, months, but we wanted to get this to you now because of what's happening with Brock. Specifically looking at Nic's perspective on how post-apartheid South Africa has kind of pickled the brains of white dudes of a specific generation.

Alix: So I'll let Nic explain a little bit more about this.

Nic: I am Nic dors. I'm the executive editor of the city. We're a nonprofit newsroom that serves the people of New York.

Alix: I don't wanna miss the opportunity to talk [00:02:00] to a South African that thinks a lot about information environments because I feel like, I don't know. I feel like the instigator of us finally sitting down and having this conversation about journalism is you being totally appalled by the use of GR by Musk to potentially reframe all of South African apartheid history.

Alix: Into some victim narrative for white South Africans, I presume as a white male, south African, you have opinions about how Musk has been engaging in information warfare?

Nic: Yeah. Elon Musk and I are the same age, and we come in some ways out of the same milieu. I know a lot of people who went to the same school as him in South Africa and the same college as him in Canada, and I think I know very well the.

Nic: Stew of resentments that he [00:03:00] swims in. People of our race, gender, and generation were the biggest beneficiaries of the end of apartheid. We came out of apartheid with an excellent, publicly funded education that was available only to whites. Just at the moment when we were no longer pariahs and we could travel the world and we could use all of the benefits of our education and our cultural capital and our global connection to accelerate us into the world.

Nic: And I think Elon Musk, like a bunch of other people, got to North America imagining that he could have sort of liberalism or democracy without race and without history and without inequality. And. Got here and was shocked to find that his desire to exist purely on his own merits was still a fiction here just as much as it would've been in South Africa.

Nic: And so rewriting all of history to suit his own narrative of heroic individualism, and then melding that with [00:04:00] eugenic and all kinds of weirder science fiction racism. It combines with what is actually a pretty typical worldview of White South African men of my generation that like, we're successful 'cause we're great.

Alix: I mean, you are great, but yeah. Uh, not a rule that can be applied to liberally.

Nic: Yeah. But I think that his, his own kind of public fight with grok is really, really useful because the crude reprogramming. That he originally had done during the white refugee moment illustrated on its face, the fact that these aren't neutral statistical models, right?

Nic: That someone designs them and influences them in a very obvious way. And what we should all be able to appreciate as a result is whether you are grok or perplexity, or. GPT, someone is sitting behind it with [00:05:00] extraordinary power to do that. He just is dumb enough to tweet about it and dumb enough to do it so badly that you can see.

Nic: And now when he says, well, we need to rethink the training material as he is currently saying, to support a white supremacist protist worldview and to eliminate bias, he's, you know, he's telling on the whole industry, not just on himself and the Republican attacks on. Work AI or work tech, which were a response to earlier critiques of bias and earlier questions about what the training data looked like and who was doing the model building.

Nic: In a sense, you know, also tell on the whole industry, there is no way to do it without these things, whether it's a kind of Obama esque version or an Elon Musk version. And so. By representing everything that lingers from our apart childhood. He's managed to tell us some pretty fundamental truths about some of the [00:06:00] risks we face and the idea that we can have.

Nic: Responsible private platforms that we can outsource. Vast swats of government function, huge pieces of journalism, infrastructure, our personal intimate relationships to those models, to some. Kind of pure math that's extracting all of human consciousness and recorded history is now just revealed for what it is.

Alix: Yeah, it's bullshit. It's bullshit and it's always a political process. And I think pretending as though your version is the apolitical version is a very common trick and it seems very transparent. But I'm curious, so obviously for. White South Africans of your generation. I imagine that there's an attempt to prop up an information environment that confirms and kind of validates the resentments of that generation.

Alix: Like what has the information project been like in South Africa to protect White South [00:07:00] Africans from really grappling with the history?

Nic: Yeah, the apartheid. Information environment persisted after apartheid. So, for example, the company that was the most important vector of the apartheid information world was it was owned most of the Afrikaans language newspapers.

Nic: It owned. Publishing companies. It owned and launched the Africa wide satellite TV Monopoly multi-choice. In the mid nineties, it became the biggest internet service provider in the country and also a major investor in tech companies across the emerging world, including Tencent in China, including mail au and some canny investments in Facebook.

Nic: And it is now I think, the second largest listed tech company in Europe Process. And it is kind of the last substantial media group standing in South Africa. Now, I'm not suggesting that its journalism continues to prop up an [00:08:00] apart eight information worldview, but all of that infrastructure persisted and remained under pretty much the same control, white control, essentially reformed white control as had been the case under apartheid.

Nic: Initially, the press slowly and awkwardly embraced change and started to look very different and sound very different. The party of kind of white, formerly liberal resentment started to fracture off its own information world as the traditional information world transformed and started to serve wider publics.

Nic: So you got, uh. Small time version of right-wing podcasting, for example, that began to flourish in South Africa. The Democratic Alliance, the liberal, and still largely white opposition party, its leader, became a prolific Twitter commentator and her frustration with. The ruling party. Much of that frustration justified, but her [00:09:00] frustration with the ruling party congealed more and more into pushback against affirmative action and pushback against, as she would say, m And then at the same time, without making this too complicated, there is a largely Afri speaking, a right wing movement that developed in the immediate aftermath of apartheid as a kind of white afrikaan lobby.

Nic: There was a trade union called solidarity. There is a. Self-styled civil rights group called AFRI Forum, which took the myth of white genocide and disproportionate levels of violence on White Farms and pushed it locally and then fed it into the international conversation. So that's the kind of brew in which Musk's view of South Africa and Musk's view of the US now percolate.

Nic: I think he was probably very removed from it. I think he's been attracted back into it and there's a kind of circuit between him and that world. One way to think about Elon Musk's [00:10:00] reprogramming of Grock is that he would like to build a massively scaled up, massively more efficient, more pervasive version of the information world of his childhood.

Nic: You didn't need a problematic large language model to create the white South African information bubble of our childhood. You had schools, you had textbooks, you got your media either from the state broadcaster or from naspa, or maybe if you were English, speaking from the nominally more liberal English language media group, independent newspapers, and you lived in an information world that was almost as hermetic as a white suburb, and you could live in a white suburb.

Nic: And feel like you lived in a racially homogenous democracy except for the people that cleaned your house and took care of your kids because it looked like a democracy. A democracy only for white people. LLMs is white suburbs. That's in a way what is, and everything that was [00:11:00] reflected back to you as a young white man about your competence, effectiveness, entrepreneurial genius, whatever it might be.

Nic: Was reinforced by that information world. So if you're trying to scale that up and not be confronted by what's just beyond the gate, sure, that's the version of what he's doing. And in traditional media, of course, there were ways in which we replicated that as well. Even if you look at much more low key things like automated search prompts, if I go and type in the name of a lower income New York City suburb like Brownsville or East New York into the Google search dialogue.

Nic: Auto suggestions are gonna be, is Brownsville sketchy? How dangerous is East New York? Should I go to Cypress Hills? That's a result, both of reinforcing queries that other people have used and of training data just in the search algorithm that comes from journalism that only represents those neighborhoods.

Nic: In those terms, again, [00:12:00] grok is useful as an extreme. Highlight of the ways in which some of these systems, just because of how they function, replicate and amplify and make it harder to escape from a set of frames and information dynamics that pre-exist them.

Alix: I love this idea of LLMs as a white suburb.

Alix: 'cause I feel like Google search results are the same in that it is. With the digital divide, you're more likely to have people with privilege online. When that happens, you end up having their information needs and requests be of a very particular type, which then means that the corpus of data that these models are trained on is basically much more likely to come from the minds of people who have been trained to fear the other, which is a very particular part of society.

Alix: And then it creates this sense that like what is real is reaffirming. This kind of white view of the world. Thank you so much. This is super interesting to talk about the histories of post apartheid South [00:13:00] Africa and how it's rotting Musk's brain and what it might mean for other people and their understanding of our very recent past.

Alix: It's been good too. Talk some of it through with you.

Alix: Okay, great. I hope this gave you a new perspective on. Musk's not so surprising, not so. Turn, turn with grok. And I just love this idea and it really stuck with me that grok is an attempt at building the information environment of a white suburb in post apartheid South Africa. And I think when we think of it like that, it becomes a lot easier to understand maybe Musk's psychology of resentment and anger.

Alix: And eugenics and white supremacy. So we'll leave it there. Next we have our second episode on fact with a second big theme that the team engaged with, with researchers and presentations at the event. Um, largely focused on identity and kinda how that shows up in AI discourse. Also, if you have new stuff.

Alix: Either you're working on [00:14:00] something that's newsworthy or there's some current event that you want us to ask questions of someone in our network about it. Don't hesitate to reach out. We are interested in doing more of these shorts 'cause we think it's a fun way to engage with what's in the headlines. So hope you enjoyed this and we will see you next week.