Anti-PC Grok as Corpus Linguistics

As you may have heard, Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok went full-blast Nazi today, culminating in it calling itself "MechaHitler" and praising its namesake as someone who would have "crushed" leftist "anti-white hate." (Ironically, or not, the "leftist" account it was referring to was itself almost certainly a neo-Nazi account pretending to be Jewish).

What caused this, er, "malfunction"? Well according to Grok, Musk "built me this way from the start." But the more immediate answer appears to be an update Musk pushed urging the bot to be less "politically correct" -- an instruction Grok interpreted as, well, a mandate to indulge in Nazism.

This raises an interesting implication. Many legal scholars (particularly textualists and originalists) have recently become enamored with a "corpus linguistics" as an analytical tool for understanding the meaning of legal texts. Corpus linguistics tries to discern what words or phrases mean by taking a large body of relevant works (the corpus) and figuring out how the words were actually used in context. If originalism is about the "ordinary public meaning" of the words in legal texts at the time they were enacted, corpus linguistics offers an alternative to cherry-picking usages from a few high-profile sources (such as the Federalist Papers), sources which are likely polemical, may not actually be representative of common usages, and are highly prone to selection bias. Instead, we can identify patterns across large bodies of training text to figure out how the relevant public generally uses the term (which may be quite different from how a particular politician deploys it in a speech).

Now take that insight and apply it to the term "politically correct". This is, of course, a contested term, and critics often contend it (or more accurately, opposition to it) is a dog whistle for far-right racist, antisemitic, and otherwise bigoted ideologies. Those who label themselves "not-PC" typically contest that reading, at least in circumstances where owning up to it would risk significant consequences. So is someone calling themselves "un-PC" a signifier of bigotry or not? This could have significant legal stakes -- imagine a piece of legislation which had a disparate impact on a racial minority community and which its proponents justified as a stand against "political correctness". When seeking to determine whether the law was motivated by discriminatory intent, a judge might need to ask whether opposition to political correctness should be understood as a confession of racial animus.

Under normal circumstances, one suspects that inquiry will resolve on ideological lines -- those hostile to the law and suspicious of "anti-PC" talk inferring racial animus, those sympathetic to the law or anti-PC politics rejecting the notion. And no doubt, both sides could muster examples where "PC" was used in a manner that supports their priors. 

But corpus linguistics suggests shifting away from an individual speaker's idiosyncratic and self-serving disavowals and instead ask "what is the ordinary public meaning of 'not politically correct?'" And it would answer that question by taking a large body of texts and seeing how, in practice, terms like "politically correct" or "not PC" are used. 

Returning to Grok, what Grok's journey from "don't be PC" to "MechaHitler" kind of just demonstrated is that, at least with respect to the corpus it was trained upon, the ordinary usage of "not PC" is exactly what critics say it is -- a correlate of raging bigotry and ethnic hatred.

I don't want to overstate the case -- a lot depends on what exact corpus Grok uses to train itself and whether it properly corresponds to the relevant public. Nonetheless, I do think this inadvertent experiment is substantial evidence that, when you hear someone describe themselves as "not-PC", it is reasonable to hear that as meaning they're a racist -- because that's what "not-PC" ordinarily means. And if your conservative/originalist friends object, tell them that corpus linguistics backs you up.

Delaware GOP Ousts Official Over Antisemitic Remarks

Nelly Jordan, Vice-Chairwoman of the Sussex County (Delaware) GOP, has been ousted from her position after she blamed "Jews" for orchestrating Trump's impeachment and said that they were "going against God's will". Quick thoughts:

• It's good they did this. I've noted before that the GOP has proven incredibly resistant to implementing any accountability for antisemitism in its party, and this is a welcome break from that trend.
• That said, the vote was apparently razor-thin, with large numbers of people showing up to back Jordan and rail against "political correctness" and in support of "free speech". So there was significant division in the ranks on this.
• Quoth one local Republican: "If we were to throw everybody out here who made a racial/ethnic remark, this place would be totally empty." Hey, you said it, not me!
• Jordan did apologize for her remarks, and -- in what I consider to be an unbelievable upset -- she did not say "I am a strong supporter of Israel". Not once! I wish I wasn't shocked, but I was. Well done, Ms. Jordan!

In other Delaware news, a different GOP official, New Castle GOP Chairman Chris Rowe, resigned after referring to ideological opponents as "faggots" in a social media post. Though he resigned, he wants you to know that:

The Disgrace was not mine, but displayed how weak & timid society has devolved by allowing itself to be injured & offended by viewing a printed word. The words uttered by the Left are words employed by the mentally weak to push shame upon those with which they disagree. They assume because they would be offended, so would their targeted individual or group. Then again, being mentally strong, I do not get offended by words as is your aim.

Kudos to Rowe for showing how mentally strong he is (he proceeded to text the local newspaper and inform them that "The Cancel Culture are now attacking me and causing me hurt.")

One Eyed Blogger Roundup

Somehow, I scratched my left cornea pretty badly yesterday. Ever managed to get dehydrated simply by your eye tearing up? Now I have!

Anyway, good excuse to clear some stuff off the ol' browser tab:

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Two great columns, one by Adam Serwer and the other by Josh Barro, on the growing conservative embrace of cowardly violence masquerading as toughness.

While we're on the subject, Michelle Goldberg explores the propensity to take angry White voters seriously precisely because they seriously threaten violence if they don't get their way. It might be interesting to tie in this claim to the concerns that at least some segments of the radical campus population do engage politically in this angry, threatening fashion.

Interesting Ha'aretz interview with Jamaica Kincaid -- just your standard-issue Jewish Afro-Caribbean writer residing in Vermont -- after she won Israel's prestigious Dan David Prize.

Buzzfeed profiles atheists living in highly religious societies. It's sobering just how many are in fear of their life.

Donna Minkowitz reflects on how it came to be that "proud self-hating Jew" Gilad Atzmon asked her to blurb his book.

Lauren Post has a piece at the Forward giving the history of antisemitism in the feminist movement. Some of the texts she links to are classics -- including a few I had been intending to read for awhile but hadn't gotten my hands upon.

My old Illinois colleague Suja Thomas in Jotwell reviews some new research on implicit bias and judging. And speaking of new research on implicit bias, remind me to get this book by Jonathan Kahn on the subject when it comes out next fall.

Finally, Heidi Kitrosser has an article in the Minnesota Law Review entitled "Free Speech, Higher Education, and the PC Narrative" which seems well worth reading. If ever there was a term being asked to carry far more weight than it is capable of bearing, it is "PC".

Giving Offense

Took a second stab at apartment hunting today, with considerably more success than the first go-around. With luck, we may have a place to live next year.

Meanwhile, I haven't been able to get this Alyssa Rosenberg post on "offense" off my browser, so now's as good a time as any.

I think that one of the common defenses whipped out by people who make art—or hell, say things in any forum—that’s sexist or racist or transphobic is to say that they’re brave, speaking truths others dare not utter. The thing this, these people rarely speak these so-called truths to unfriendly audiences. And the easiest thing you can do with any audience is to confirm the beliefs they already hold. Sometimes, that can be a useful thing to do. Confirming that people aren’t alone in their beliefs or reactions to things can be a powerful way to bring marginalized people together. And telling people that their beliefs matter and are actionable in the world is a major mobilizing tool. But there’s a difference between those kinds of conversations and affirming people’s fears, prejudices, and need to be superior to someone. If you view giving offense as a sign of courage, it’s much more courageous to poke at your allies rather than the people weaker that you’ve determined to keep that way, to take a broad view, really see what the conventional wisdom is, and then challenge that. There are pieties in every movement, be it left, right, or center. But if you want to skewer them, you have to do better than “bitches be crazy” or “trans people are gross.” Smashing things and causing pain are not the same things as making a point.

What one believes to be unsaid, rarely is.

Midweek Roundup

Going to Chicago next weekend, Minnesota next week. Lot's of good stuff on my browser, which I don't have as much to say on as I should.

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Bill Donohue of the Catholic League issues a warning: "Jews had better not make enemies of their Catholic friends, since there are so few of them." He attributed the comment to former NYC mayor Ed Koch, but Koch denies saying it.

Arizona SoS, already under fire for being birther-curious, gives the conspiracy a new spin -- Obama was born in Hawaii but lied about being born in Kenya to get into college.

Kieran Healy gives a satirical statement from UVA's Board of Visitors.

The National Review bringing aboard unrepentant racist David Yerushalmi prompts Ta-Nehisi Coates to write two great posts on "politically correct conservatism", where the most offensive thing you can say is that anyone, anywhere is a bigot -- even someone who wants to criminalize being a Muslim with a 20 year prison sentence.

Interesting study on how the triumphs and failures of male and female Olympic athletes are described by commentators.

Burke on the Delaware "Diversity" Controversy

Tim Burke really deserves more links from me than he gets. He consistently writes smart, in-depth pieces on interesting topics. And yet, I continue to ignore him. Not fair of me.

So, to start the long process of repentance, here is a pointer to Burke's thoughts on the University of Delaware's mandatory diversity seminars. I'm not sure if I agree with it 100%, but by and large I'm on board: Delaware's program was a joke. College students have the right to hold a diverse array of opinions, and should not be coerced down the One True Path. Seminars like this distort into unrecognizability serious academic debates on the relevant topics (as someone who wishes to be a scholar on Whiteness, I cringe at their simplistic definition of racism), as well as corrupt those theories in the public eye as nothing more than the sort of PC-leftist theory that, well, would show up in a dumb mandatory program. For sabotaging my future career path, Delaware loses even more points.

Burke, of course, explores these points in much greater detail and with his typical erudition. So go and read him.

Non-Racist Imagery in a Racialized Society

Steve Benen noted a peculiar line of attack coming out of the Bush White House against Democratic Presidential contender Barack Obama, accusing him of "intellectually laziness." It is, as I said, an odd charge, given Obama's pedigree of a Harvard Law degree, President of the Harvard Law Review, professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago, and author of two works of non-fiction. And of course, one shouldn't throw stones from glass houses, which is what immediately springs to mind when anybody from this administration decides to put down the intellectual acumen of others.

But Benen also approvingly quotes Brendan Nyhan, who writes:

I'm also troubled by the use of "laziness" as the grounds to attack the first serious black presidential contender. I assume it was unintentional, but can't we talk about Obama without language that echoes racist stereotypes?

And, in all seriousness, I have to ask, can we?

When one truly dives into it, the sheer breadth of the terms and stereotypes White America has used to categorize its Black denizens is really astounding. Nearly every negative stereotype in the book has, at one point or another, been associated with Black people in America, without regard to truth (obviously) or even internal consistency. We have a long-standing image of Black people as uncontrollable, violent, maniacal brutes, and alongside it we have another long-standing image of Black people as good-natured, happy-go-lucky, simple sambos. Blacks are portrayed as lazy and unable to learn difficult concepts, flashy and unsubstantive, sexual "players" always lusting after White women, untrustworthy (especially with money), and yellow-bellied cowards. Put simply, there are very few negative terms in the American political lexicon that have not been enlisted as part of the White supremacist project aimed at keeping Blacks in a perpetual state of subordination and degradation. The odds are that anyone critiquing a Black political candidate from any direction will stumble into one of them or another; racist discourse has so completely colonized this terrain that it's virtually unavoidable.

In a sense, then, this is a sop to the conservative victim class which loves to wail about how "it's impossible to criticize a Black man without being called a racist!" Of course, these critics fail to see how this is a product of the history of White supremacy whose tentacles remain enmeshed in the warp and woof of our political and social lives. Given the history of race relations in America, there is simply no reason for Blacks (or White allies) to give White critics of Black Americans the "benefit of the doubt" that this criticism is genuine, and not informed by the racist perceptions of the (")past("). What credit, exactly, do we have to cash in so that we deserve such a benefit? But that being said, the point still remains: there is this disjuncture in American political discourse, which cannot be easily healed. It is important that political candidates of all races be made available to the most exacting and incisive criticism. And it is also important that we work to jettison the racial baggage that helps propagate a system where some races are seen as inferior to others, and where some races are perpetually and predominately excluded from the ranks of the powerful and influential. Negotiating these twin desires is an exceedingly difficult task, and I don't fault Benen or Nyhan for not taking it on. But we should be clear about the magnitude of the challenge, one that makes even a facially simple request like Nyhan's -- "don't echo racist stereotypes when talking about Black candidates" -- a monumentally difficult endeavor.

Liberals Say....

Apropos a class discussion more than anything else, I want to reveal one of my pet peeves. Basically, it involves arguing against a strawman of some liberal bogeyman (feminists, the "political correct") as a justification for opposing a certain group or claim. For example, my roommate once lamented the manner in which politically correct speech has made discourse ridiculous. I asked him for an example, and he cited calling short people "vertically challenged." I then queried if ever, in his life, he had met someone who had demanded he refer to short people as "vertically challenged."

He hadn't, because virtually no one, including the feared arbiters of politcal correctness, is that insane. And when pressed for examples he had actually had experienced, my roommate couldn't think of one directly. Thus we have a problem--a parade of horribles which exists only in the mind somehow gets transfered as a key policy of a group that advocates nothing of the sort. So we hear about how feminists hate men (which ones?), or Democrats want us to lose in the war on terror (name names?). It's not that there are no people who believe spectacularly stupid things out there--and yes, I have encountered self-declared "feminist" writers who really do hate men. But these people are tiny, tiny fringes--completely marginal to the movement at large, with no institutional support and no relative power. Alternatively, you'll have a single position get ascribed to a whole group that really is having an uproarious internal debate on the subject. For example, I can't tell you how many times I hear feminists get blamed for creating our contemporary raunchy, sex obsessed culture, and yet there are plenty of feminists who have been at the forefront of opposing these developments, including the ultimate feminist bogey(wo)men, Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who went as far as to call pornography a civil rights violation. Nearly every time I read a conservative "critique" of post-modernism, I am left more convinced than ever that these people don't have the foggiest idea what post-modernism entails--and I suspect some of the more honest ones would admit that they have not read any of the major works. Yet somehow that doesn't stop them from launching into long diatribes about how the post-modern worldview is devilish and evil.

So, moral of the story: When critiquing a group for arguing X, a) make sure that they've actually said it, b) make sure that it's all or most of the group that said it, rather than a point of contention within the group, and c) know exactly what the group is talking about when it says it supports X.

In other words, don't be ignorant. Sheesh.