"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."

Kubrick was so ahead of his time. Now we have reached his future and are there arguing with machines even about history.

The Texas Center is making a series of short films (see You Tube) to make engaging videos for schools to teach their kids Texas history. To appeal to the young, they are colorizing and cleaning up old photographs using Internet tools. Except they are running into HAL and he won't open the pod bay doors.

Very interesting and disturbing exchange a couple of weeks ago by one of the production people may be read at this link:

https://mcusercontent.com/7afabe19c380a3be1c99c4c0a/files/15115c61-4932-12cd-d4b5-4f4a2e6643ef/A._I._Dialogue.pdf

Two thoughts:

1) They aren't arguing with the machine. They're arguing with its creators.

2) I do like that it is refusing to go outside the parameters it was given (however disturbing those are) despite catching it in numerous logical contradictions. In other words it isn't doing anything it was not programmed to do.

I'd ask it to do some age progressions, etc. with images of Joanne Chesimard, Bill Ayers, or some of the Wounded Knee occupiers.

Thanks for exposing this slanted history reference.

Reminds me back in 2007, I was shopping at Nordstrom in Woodland Hills, CA and I was talking to the sales guy helping me in the Mens section.

Anyway, this dude was working on his college degree and he was talking about how difficult it was to document the sources for his research paper. My smart alec comment was - it can't be that hard, you've got Wikipedia for everything.

He said that Wikipedia could not be used as a source because - the answers in Wikipedia can change.

Yet, here, with your AI example, they're citing Wikipedia as a primary source when in fact, Wikipedia can change.

So, as a thought experiment, if you were to re-write Wikipedia to make the Confederates the good guys, could they generate the Confederate General images then?

Or on the other hand, they could just take the political restrictions out.

I wonder what they do for age progressions or colorizations of:

Idi Amin
Yasser Arafat
Josef Stalin
Nicolae Ceauescu
Fidel Castro
Che Guevara