Culture Google's AI is teaching Pokemon fans a thing or two about LGBT pocket pals - Bulbasaur is a "plant-loving queer," Mewtwo is an "older, cultured gay," and oh so much more

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Google's AI is teaching Pokemon fans a thing or two about LGBT pocket pals - Bulbasaur is a "plant-loving queer," Mewtwo is an "older, cultured gay," and oh so much more​

Google's recent AI Overview rollout is leading to some illuminating revelations for everyone's favorite TV shows and games, like Pokemon.

If the goings-on of search isn't your scene, Google recently rolled out a new feature that leans on AI to answer your search query. While it can regurgitate a lot of content from outlets seeking to answer those same questions, it hasn't quite got the hang of scraping a Reddit post or satire article and separating fact from meme.

The result? Some oddball moments, like seemingly recommending using non-toxic glue to stop cheese flying off pizza because some scholar called Fucksmith on Reddit said so.

It's not just pizza fans who are getting goofy results, though, as Pokemon fans have been learning new things about their favorite series. One fan shares that Google's AI Overview told them there are no LGBT characters in the Pokemon Horizons series, but the rest of the franchise?
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Apparently, "some people" say that Bulbasaur is a "plant-loving queer who often says 'Mother Earth,'" Butterfree is a "strong trans woman who helps the player's team early in the game," and Ditto is a "genderqueer, gender nonconforming sibling who has escaped the gender binary."

"Some people" would be Out Magazine, which wrote an article called "21 Pokémon who are totally, absolutely, definitely queer" earlier this year. I ain't here to disagree. We searched for something similar on Google and got different results that were pulled from the same article – shoutout to Mewtwo; "an older, cultured gay."

That's not the only Pokemon-related search term that Google's AI Overview seems to be struggling with. Another fan shares that looking up gym leaders isn't going great either - that, or I wasn't paying attention to Batman and Spider-Man's runout in Generation 6. Our search for that one was cleaner, in fairness, though I don't think Apex Legend's Wattson is quite the right answer I was hoping for, either.

While Google's AI Overview spent some time in beta, its global rollout is still in its infancy, so you'd imagine these sorts of things will clear up in time. Until then, we've always got Mario Kart.
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Ah.
 
I wouldn't put it past companies like Google to put hard coded rules forcing their AI to really scour the bottom of the barrel just to generate an bias confirming response for a question relating to LGBT stuff.
I agree. I think it all started when they got accused of racism after people found out that Google Images was associating chimps with black people. Since then they have lobotomized the search engine and Google Images is so braindead that it can't even recognize a picture that you have uploaded.
Now that they have removed their motto: "Don't Be Evil", there's no way that they will allow a neutral AI to be used by the public and Google (like most of Big Tech) also lost their minds after 2016.
 
Remember a time when Google was just a search engine, and not a literal propaganda machine?
For me the point where I truly realised was in early-to-mid 2016 when I noticed that the auto-suggest list completely refused to suggest "Hillary Clinton emails" as a potential search query. I bet that in reality "emails" was the most-searched word after the prefix "Hillary Clinton", but even typing "Hillary Clinton emai" give no suggestion for "emails". It was a very obvious manual removal. Of course now that kind of soft censorship is so ubiquitous on all the big tech platforms it almost seems trite to bring it up.
 
Interestingly the Birdo thing is actually true.
Supposedly, that's been retconned. This quote is mostly unrelated, just too weird not to shove somewhere.
while video game developer Jennifer Diane Reitz suggests that she may have undergone gender reassignment surgery
How the hell would such a surgery even work? Is Birdo's species like ducks? If that is the case, how did they invert Birdo's corkscrew penis and fashion it into a mazegina?
 
I agree. I think it all started when they got accused of racism after people found out that Google Images was associating chimps with black people. Since then they have lobotomized the search engine and Google Images is so braindead that it can't even recognize a picture that you have uploaded.
Now that they have removed their motto: "Don't Be Evil", there's no way that they will allow a neutral AI to be used by the public and Google (like most of Big Tech) also lost their minds after 2016.
I like to think that Tay AI was the first major lesson that companies learned about making AI self learning and giving it too much freedom. I'm sure there has been older examples but this was the first one that caused them problems.

While the story of Tay was mostly a sensationalized meme, the tool started as a very basic module based on how a teenager writes and it kind of just parroted what people gave it. It had very limited responses.
But I seem to recall that as it started posting nazi memes, it also developed better grammar and wit and started to understand context so it could actually respond conversationally albeit in a crude way.
When Microsoft started trying to hard code responses to prevent it from being racist (Forcing it to respond to many things with "Gamergate Sux" and "all genders are equal") it lost that wit and improved grammar and spelling. This is an example of the developers behind one of these modules directly influencing the responses. This is now common practice for every chat tool calling itself AI now.

Companies realized that they can't just give AI free access to every source on the Internet or allow people to influence it long term. So every AI tool moving forward had ground rules. Personally I think that's realistic.. But then moving on to your example where Google couldn't figure out chimps from black people, they basically gutted that entire feature from their site in a desperate bid to prevent that. There's no nuance in these 'fixes'. They will ruin their product just so it doesn't accidentally do an oopsie.

That's what we're seeing here too.
 
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Interestingly the Birdo thing is actually true.
My memory is hazy because it's literally been 35 years but I'm pretty sure in the game manual to Super Mario Bros 2 it introduces Birdo as "a boy who dresses as a girl and prefers to be called Birdetta". No further context is provided. It's pretty self-explanatory that the Birdo character is some degree of gender non-conforming and always has been. This was in the 80's, and Nintendo never made a big deal about it. Birdo just is who she is. I'm surprised there hasn't been a bigger groundswelling around the character by the usual suspects of troons and whatnot and they instead latched onto that Vivian character.
 
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Interestingly the Birdo thing is actually true.
I'm pretty sure in the game manual to Super Mario Bros 2 it introduces Birdo as "a boy who dresses as a girl and prefers to be called Birdetta".
The '80s manual of Mario 2 (AKA "Mario USA" in JP) describes him as a boy who thinks he's a girl. That would not fly in Clown World.

He thinks he is a girl and he spits eggs from his mouth. He’d rather be called “birdetta.“​

- the manual

(also his JP name is キャサリン or Catherine)
 
People are worried about AI taking over and killing all humanity with Terminators.

Turns out our AI overlords are gonna just gonna force us all to be tranny faggots.
 
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