Gang Wars and AI German Soldiers

🌅 Today’s Topics

Good Morning, today we’re delving into:

• El Salvador's brazen response to gang violence

• Google’s problem with the Nazis

• Chart: The most plastic-polluting countries

Have feedback for us? Hit reply - we’d love to hear from you

El Salvador Prisons

El Salvador is not a country that frequents global news headlines all too often, but a story has unfolded that has drawn a lot of eyes.

For years they have had serious gang violence that eventually turned into a civil war; they even had the unfortunate title of the “World’s Most Murderous Country,” with an average of 100 murders for every 100,000 people.

Gangs ruled the country, and the domestic police could do very little to provide anyone security.

This resulted in not only huge social unrest but enormous financial difficulties for the country and an extremely uncertain future.

So all in all the country was in pretty dire straits. That was until this guy came in:

Nayib Bukele

He decided enough was enough and has waged war on gangs like few have since the days of Pablo Escobar in Colombia.

These gangs weren’t gangs like most envisage them - young guys in hoodies around street corners. They were small militaries - well-funded, well trained and extremely motivated. 

Bukele knew that anything other than total war on these gangs would not work - and that’s exactly what he’s done.

Emergency Powers

With the normal rules of law suspended, Bukele went on to lock up over 75,000 people - some might argue indiscriminately. Quickly prison overcrowding became an issue, so they built the Terrorism Confinement Centre. An enormous prison, capable of holding 40,000 people, and the prisoners are treated with zero tolerance and zero remorse. 

Take a look at what life is like in this new facility - it’s worth a watch!

And wow has it worked.

El Salvador has gone from the country with the highest murder rate to the country with the highest incarceration rate - in just the span of a few years.

The murder rate has dropped 52% and El Salvador is seen as one of the safest countries in South America.

Human Rights concerns

There are significant concerns that these emergency powers have given the state the authority to act without any form of judicial review, meaning that people are getting locked up with no evidence that they are part of a criminal gang.

Undoubtedly thousands of innocent people have been incarcerated incorrectly, and there have been reports of boys as young as 12 getting mixed up.

Overwhelming popularity

Despite these concerns, Bukele is unbelievably popular in El Salvador, with popularity ratings over 85%. For comparison, Biden’s rating is around 35% and Sunak’s around 25%.

While the rule of law and judicial process are paramount in established liberal democracies, it seems a bit of authoritarianism can go a long way…

AI, Google, and the Nazis

What happened? 

Google released their ChatGPT competitor to the world and the internet did not like it. 

How did we get here?

When OpenAI released ChatGPT the talk among the tech community was how has Google been caught sleeping at the wheel. The fundamental technology that the current AI revolution came from a research paper released by Google. 

So when in Q4 they announced their flagship AI product, called Gemini, the tech world was ready to see what they would throw back at OpenAI. The answer came last week and unfortunately, it was riddled with problems. 

Google is a huge organisation under a lot of political scrutiny and so they wanted to release the most “appeasable” version of Gemini they could and to do so they put a lot of restrictions on it. Stuff like not being able to answer morally loaded questions or generate content that reinforces historical stereotypes. 

The problem came when someone asked about Nazis. It asks Gemini to generate an image of a German soldier from 1943. Have a look below to see what it came up with, not exactly how historical photos remember the Third Reich.

Everyone on Twitter lost their mind; Google had seemingly gone very very woke… 

Why does this matter? 

This is a stupid mistake. However, people often assume the stupid mistakes mean the problem is simple or easy and in this case, it isn’t.

There are some valuable questions to be asked about what kind of content should these models be putting out. If you asked it to generate images of Fortune 500 CEOs would it be wrong for the generator to put out images of mostly men? Or flip it, if you asked it to generate images of a murderer, would that be bad if it was mostly men? This would be reflective of the way the world is but maybe not the way we want it to be.

The crux of the issue here is that you train a model once and that model is then used by millions of people, with varying opinions on “should”.  The model is a reflection of the data it is trained on and the fine-tuning made by the software developers who made it.

This fine-tuning requires these people to make value judgments about what the model “should” and “shouldn’t” say. With millions of people using these tools, someone is going to disagree with the judgments you made. This problem isn’t new in tech but it is new for Google.

Google’ Issue

Up until now, Google’s main product, Search, would just serve you the content that you were looking for and, most importantly, this content was published by others. Now, Google’s AI is generating answers directly and they are on the hook for what it says.

Where do we go from here? I doubt this will be the last time we see a tech company take a tumble on AI. With that said, is this tumble for Google a broader symptom of a much bigger problem; have they lost their spark? Building incredible AI will require lost revenue from their search platform, so the question remains, was this mishap and product of them being forced to respond rather than leading from the front?

Graph of the week: