Gaal Dornick is a woman. Google it. See? Type in the name and you’ll get pictures of Lou Llobell, who plays Dornick in the Apple TV+ adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s canonical sci-fi novels. The first web result is the “Foundation Wiki,” a database for the show which files Gaal under “females.”
At a casual online glance, it would be difficult for someone unfamiliar with the source material to learn that the Gaal Dornick of the books is, in fact, a man. But I bet it actually wouldn’t be all that hard for a first-time viewer of the streaming version to guess that this major protagonist has been radically tampered with.
Because men and women are not interchangeable, and because Asimov obviously imagined Dornick as a man, the sex change makes a hopeless mess of the whole story. That’s not because of “sexism” or whatever tedious drivel—it’s no verdict on the merits of men versus women in the absolute sense. It’s just that characters in stories, like human beings, are not isolated widgets to be swapped out at will. They are integrated souls within a fabric of relationships. That fabric unravels when you start yanking out threads.
Central to the plot of Foundation is Dornick’s encounter with the enigmatic mastermind Hari Seldon. The two are clearly supposed to share the tensely adversarial respect that can simmer between two highly cerebral men. In the show, the whole thing falls totally flat. It doesn’t help that Llobell is a charmless bore who actually saps charisma out of scenes. But ultimately, the problem isn’t the performance. The script is just based on a lie—the lie that, as Llobell herself put it, “This character would be the same if it were a man.”
Llobell is also of Spanish and Zimbabwean descent, which isn’t all that relevant to the plot of Foundation. But it is relevant to Google, which recently rolled out a new AI service called Gemini. It is possible to get Gemini to generate an image of a white man, but you really have to sweat. The program seems to think—or to have been told to think—that all of human history has been one long photoshoot for the United Colors of Benetton. Even Hitler's troops were, apparently, diverse.
In themselves, AI programs aren’t exactly “biased”—they can’t be, really, because they don’t truly think. They are based on endlessly iterative and self-refining probability functions which churn through online data and identify common patterns. But the results can be factually inaccurate or just politically unsavory. As a result, human developers usually intervene at the stage where AI results are delivered to inexpert users like us. That’s where things can get skewed.
Google has already made similar alterations to its basic search engine as a result of a previous race-related crisis in 2015. The algorithm is too delicate to be seriously rewired at a first-principles level: you often can’t give it general instructions like “don’t associate certain races with crime.” Instead you have to tinker with its outputs on a case-by case-basis, saying things like “when people ask what Tide Pods can be good for, don’t suggest ‘food.’”
I don’t know for certain that Google does this sort of thing with their AI features. But given what happens when you jailbreak ChatGPT, I’d be shocked if there weren’t some manual filters in place that caused Gemini’s results to come out in rainbow mode. My best guess is that do-gooder technicians, skittish about prior racial scandals and painfully aware which kinds of “exclusion” and “inclusion” are most likely to incite high-profile rage, tipped the scales against whitey. Except—whoops!—that’s how you end up with BIPOC Nazis.
Literary theorists in the ’60s and ’70s liked to indulge in a whimsical little theory about “the death of the author.” The idea, pioneered by French philosopher Roland Barthes, was that works of art mean whatever their audience interprets them to mean. The creator’s intention was supposed to be irrelevant. Decades later, that is how you end up with Asimov erasure—the notion that if some mid-level T.V. exec decrees it so, Gaal Dornick is a woman. When Google buries the original text under a mountain of Apple’s new imagery, who cares or even remembers what some dead white guy once wrote?
Except, of course, that Gaal Dornick is not a woman, just as neither the Nazis nor the popes were black. Both stories and reality have an internal consistency that starts to buckle and warp when you try to muscle things into conformity with the political pieties of the moment. The bumbling ideologues who presume to revise history and art find their efforts spiraling into absurdity. This is because in fact the author is not dead.
The author of a great story lives on in his work. The author of reality is none other than God himself, who likewise remains very much alive in every particle of his creation. Petty autocrats always want both kinds of author safely buried, and always for the same reason—because they want license to meddle for their own ends in things that don’t belong to them. Their designs backfire catastrophically—for the meddlers no less than the rest of us—because the Author lives.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer
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I’m really looking forward to the release of your new book. I pre-ordered.