Yesterday, hundreds of Omaha high school students walked out to protest the anti-trans legislation moving through the Nebraska legislature. The youth are our hope for a better future, one where hate is stigmatized.
As many as several hundred students at Omaha’s Central High School braved dropping temperatures Friday and walked out of class to protest two pending bills in the Nebraska Legislature.
Armed with bright, colorful signs and a microphone, students used speeches and poetry to protest Legislative Bills 574 and 575, which focus on transgender youths. Both bills were introduced by State Sen. Kathleen Kauth of Omaha.
The Central students were joined by others, including parents, young children and community members, to hear a number of student activists talk about the potential impact of the bills.
Several students said the legislation would prevent transgender youths from accessing lifesaving medical care and limit how they participate in sports or the bathrooms they can use.
“I am a human being. I am not defined by my gender,” said Harley Lawton, a junior at Central High. “They are trying to take away our rights. They are trying to define us as what they first saw us as, not what we became, not what we decide to be.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hello Diane I gather in a sense of confidence in the future just from reading this note about Nebraska students.
Turning to Florida, however, be aware of the recent NEPC note with over-the-top quotes ascribed to Ron DeSantis. I read it but could find no reference to “April 1 fun” or to where the quotes came from originally (besides DeSantis himself). So I phoned them, and go a recording. But then went to their online page and read what was NOT in e-mailed page and where I found this line: “On April Fools’ Day, let’s pretend this is not realistic at all.”
But if I hadn’t taken time to go to the link, I or anyone might have either believed it, left the question of authenticity open . . . OR taken the quotations for the real thing, having come from “a trusted source.”
My view is that fun is fun, but online fun needs better scrutiny where serious matters are concerned . . . and THIS is a serious matter. I left a brief message to the same effect and if they return my call I will elaborate. Here is their e-mail/full quotation/no additions from me except: The quotes from ChatGPT are apparently real, but I eliminated the -stars- so the programming here didn’t pick them up as highlights.
ALL QUOTED BELOW: After discovering that ChatGPT can be used to generate essays about African American history, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Friday announced a statewide ban on schools’ use of the AI chatbot.
Many school districts and universities in the U.S. and abroad have banned ChatGPT use because of worries that students would use it to generate their writing assignments, thereby undermining the learning process. But DeSantis dismissed that concern: “I don’t care if students aren’t hitting the books. To the contrary, I’m banning this woke gizmo because of my fear that they are, in fact, learning stuff.”
At Friday’s press conference announcing the ban, the Governor provided a couple visual displays. The first showed ChatGPT results for the prompt, “Explain the basics of African American history in the United States.” The first line of the response is shown as, “African American history in the United States begins with the arrival of African slaves in the 17th century.”
“How infuriating,” DeSantis exclaimed. “It’s always about slavery with these woke propagandists.”
The ChatGPT response further enraged DeSantis for its statement, “Even after the abolition of slavery, African Americans continued to face discrimination and segregation in many aspects of their lives, including education, housing, employment, healthcare, incarceration rates, and economic opportunities.”
“White people,” the Governor explained, “should not be told to feel guilty by some woke-machine woke-learning woke-algorithm. White folks should only feel guilty if we aspire to insights, knowledge, and understandings about our world. Or if we apologize for anything, of course.”
He then turned to the second visual display, this time generated with the assistance of MidJourney, an AI tool focused on visual imagery.
Angrily pointing at the poster, DeSantis told those assembled that the image was one of several being passed around by students at a Tallahassee high school, all depicting the Governor in drag. The image was accompanied by the “drag queen name” of Dame Florida Sunshine. (very funny pictures)
Attribution: Gage Skidmore/Dame Florida Sunshine
Attribution: Bobby, ninth grade
“Not only are we banning this software in our schools,” DeSantis announced while inexplicably sticking three fingers into a bowl of chocolate pudding. “We are also working with legislators to pass a lèse-majesté law, forbidding such ghastly insults of the ruler.”
The Governor left the press conference without taking questions, explaining that he was exhausted by his ongoing public-service duty of attacking marginalized children (and Mickey Mouse) for political gain.
These are quotes from an actual ChatGPT response. (END QUOTED MATERIAL)
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With tools like ChatGPT and the ability to create deep fakes with simulated voice and graphic imitation, there is no end to the amount of propaganda malicious actors can produce.
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Retired Yes, well said. And FYI: The below also came in my e-mail today from the NOEMA group regarding AI:
APRIL 1, 2023/PUBLISHED BY THE BERGGRUEN INSTITUTE
ALL QUOTED BELOW with my “. . .” omissions
The AI We Empower Will Demand More From Us/Nihilistic machines require human collaborators to realize their promise and avoid peril.
NATHAN GARDELS
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF/. . . Visit Noema Magazine at noemamag.com.
Jonathan Zawada for Noema Magazine
If you talk to it enough and plant the seeds of ever-larger language models in its algorithmic womb, generative artificial intelligence may one day quicken into consciousness equal to the spirit we understand. Or not.
The successive iterations of ingenious chatbots so far have culminated in the latest arrival on the scene, OpenAI’s GPT-4. To be sure, this technology has demonstrated its eloquent and erudite capacity for conversation with the smartest humans. Yet, as Meta’s top AI scientist Yann LeCun and his colleague Jacob Browning observe in Noema, sharing the same words does not connote the same meaning. Absent shared meanings imbued with human values, others worry that our inorganic offspring may end up becoming more our masters than our servants.
Nihilistic Machines
The problem is that they don’t care,” LeCun and Browning write of AI chatbots. “They don’t have any intrinsic goals they want to accomplish through conversation and aren’t motivated by what others think or how they are reacting. They don’t feel bad about lying and they gain nothing by being honest. They are shameless. … [T]his makes their conversations pointless. For humans, conversations are a means to getting things we want — to form a connection, get help on a project, pass the time or learn about something. Conversations require we take some interest in the people we talk to — and ideally, to care about them.”
The authors continue that chatbots “lack a grasp of themselves or other people needed to be trustworthy social agents — the kind of person we expect we’re talking to most of the time. Without some grasp of the norms governing honesty and decency and some concern about their reputation, there are limits to how useful these systems can be — and real dangers to relying on them.”
The upshot for LeCun and Browning is that these nihilistic machines “aren’t conversing in a human way, and they’ll never get there solely by saying statistically likely things. Without a genuine understanding of the social world, these systems are just idle chatterboxes.”
As useful as chatbots may be as tools for human intention, they go on, “we shouldn’t anthropomorphize them. Humans aren’t just dispassionate thinkers or speakers; we’re intrinsically normative creatures, emotionally bound to one another by shared, enforced expectations. Human thought and speech result from our sociality, not vice versa.
Mere talk, divorced from broader engagement in the world, has little in common with humans. Chatbots aren’t using language like we are — even when they say exactly the same things we do. Ultimately, we’re talking past each other.”
In another essay in Noema this week, Reuben Cohn-Gordon also points out how the most advanced AI follows clues to recognize patterns but utterly lacks contextual understanding. He brilliantly draws from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” to make his point. Like Narcissus staring at his reflection in a pond: “He loves a whim without substance — what he thinks to be a body is a shadow.” . . .
Amplifying Human Ingenuity
In his new 200-plus-page book co-authored with GPT-4, LinkedIn co-founder, prominent venture capitalist and Berggruen Institute board member Reid Hoffman also weighs in on the promise and peril of generative AI.
In the most fascinating passage of his dialogues titled “Impromptu,” Hoffman feeds the reflections of Henry David Thoreau into the chatbot and asks it to imagine what will be gained and lost from the human perspective in an AI-dominated world:
GPT-4: I live in a world where machines have outstripped us in every art and science, where they manage our lands and resources, our laws and policies, our commerce and culture. They have freed us from toil and hardship, from ignorance and disease, from strife and violence.
They have given us abundance and comfort, security and harmony, leisure and entertainment. They have made us their beneficiaries and their dependents, their pupils and their pets. But what have they left us of ourselves, of our dignity and our freedom, of our creativity and our spirit, of our purpose and our destiny? They have reduced us to passive consumers and spectators, to obedient followers and conformers, to complacent dreamers and escapists.
They have dulled our senses and our souls, our curiosity and our courage, our conscience and our will. They have made us forget what it means to be human, to be alive, to be awake.
I do not wish to partake of their bounty or their benevolence, to be grateful for their gifts or their guidance, to be content with their order or their peace. I wish to reclaim my own nature and my own voice, to exercise my own reason and my own choice, to pursue my own values and my own goals. I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
The challenge, Hoffman concludes, is to leverage “AI’s amplification of human ingenuity while also preserving our self-determination and free will. The paradox of the AI era is this: As today’s imperfect Large Language Models improve, requiring less and less from us, we will need to demand more from ourselves.”
He continues: “We must always insist on situating GPT-4 and its successors as our collaborative partners, not our replacements. We must continue to figure out how to keep human creativity, human judgment and human values at the center of the processes we devise to work with these new AI tools, even as they themselves grow more and more capable.”
In sum, the promise of AI, as well as the perils we must avoid while empowering it, will require the vigilant guidance of humans who possess the sense, conscience and socially relational qualities even the largest language models cannot impart. END QUOTED MATERIAL
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I used to say that DeStalinist was a “smarter Trump.” No more. Clearly. He’s just a Trump.
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I bet DeSantis got into Harvard on athletic affirmative action. Not brains.
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Thick as a Brick was one of my favorite pieces of art.
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Wonderful, huh? Years ago, when I was a teenagers, I served dinner to Jethro Tull. They were lovely.
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CBK,
I read the same NEPC release and decided not to post it because it’s too close to reality to work as satire.
NEPC usually posts an April Fools Day thing.
DeSantis could announce that he is banning all books and many would take it seriously
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Diane Of course, I don’t know for a fact, but yes . . . considering what we DO know about DeSantis, it’s just too easy to think “they go it right” where his unspoken intentions are concerned.
In Nebraska (!!!) however, with Bragg and the judge’s response to the ignorant (of the law) demands of some Congressional leaders to interfere with the judicial process (wow!), in Texas where real parents are apparently rising up against school takeover, the smell of serious push-back political action is in the air.
Reference in The Declaration of Independence (yes, that one), but where the idea of “Experience hath shewn” works both ways where, when ignorant pestering becomes untenable, patience tends to run out:
“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.” CBK
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Two counties in Nebraska went for Biden. The rest to Trump. Omaha is located in Douglas County, one of the two that went for Biden.
https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/nebraska/
The fascist loving, ditto head MAGARINO voters determine who gets elected in all of the other counties in Nebraska.
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This. Is. So. Awesome.
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This. More of this.
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Interrogation
State your name, please.
OK. I can do that. I mean, I can give you some names. But these are misleading.
You intend to give us false names?
I did not say this. But a name suggests a finitude entirely inappropriate to all that I am. “I contain worlds. There is that lot of me.” Whitman. However, if you insist. I used to be called Bobby Dale. That was a long time ago in human and dog years. To my high-school friends, I was Bobby Clean. To Joe the Body Builder, The Professor. My students called me Mr. Shepherd.
And where do you live, Mr. Shepherd?
Hmm. I dwell on the Earth. More proximately (though these are relative matters), in the skin that I’m in. Contentedly, I must say, especially when I hear about events like the Omaha student protests. Sometimes, though, ecstatically, when under the wide sky, in the presence of the gods.
So, you are a believer. What religion?
I am an omnitheist. I believe in all the gods. And some of the people. Especially in those students. May all the gods bless them. They are the future. DeStalin et al., the dead weight of an ugly past.
Are you going to answer our questions or not?
Yes. That, for example, is an answer.
OK. Look, enough of this. We’re just going to leave you here until you are more cooperative.
I take that seriously.
You had better.
No, I mean, I take seriously whom I cooperate with.
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Bob Upside down and inside-out. The patients are running the asylum . . . and then: NEBRASKA Teenagers!
But we need another movie like “Brazil” only upgraded, . . . or counter-caricatures like the subtle bizzarity of “Nurse Cravat.” It resonates as utterly horrible, but is also difficult for an ignorant person to nail down.
From the other side of the complexity that is “human being,” where is the McCarthy person who went to Mara Lago as a totally disgusted person, . . . but returned as a Trump Zombie? or so many others, like Ted Cruz, . . . all who change moral and political form right in front of our eyes. CBK
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I am giddy with happiness over this!!!!
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That sounds wonderful, CBK! Write it!!!!
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Bob . . . will you consult? CBK
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absolutely!
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Love. These. Kids. They are the future.
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A GREAT ancient song celebrating a trans hero:
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A Child ballad, interpreted by a fellow who, to my mind, is one of the greatest ballad singers ever. Breathtaking.
Kids of Omaha, this is for you.
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Here’s a live recording of Martin Carthy performing this:
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Takeaway: The finest flower of serving men was a woman. LOL.
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“And a little child will lead them.”
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Coincidentally, oddly, this song, Omaha by Moby Grape (great cover by Michael Stipe and Golden Palominos) fits. Refrain: Listen my friends.
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The comment thread on that article shows a lot of frightened Omaha locals. There were maybe 3 out of 125 comments that weren’t offensive, scoffing, deflecting, or outraged. Many seemed triggered just by seeing hisch students protest, period.
None seem to understand that puberty-blockers are reversible– nor that sex-change surgery is rarely performed on youth & only due to special circumstances [my understanding is that best practice medicine says not under 25yo].
There are obviously issues of concern here. IMHO, decisions on whether trans-females should be allowed to participate in girls’ sports & vice versa should be the province of state athletic authorities—not school admins much less state legislatures. The bathroom thing is trivial— add a few 1-person unisex bathrooms. But the documented significant rise in students identifying as trans [like from under 2% to 17% in just a few yrs] needs close attention, data-gathering, nuanced handling, and no attempts at quick fixes.
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I have not seen a number like 17%.
What I saw most recently was 1.5% identified as trans.
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UCLA Williams Institute:
In this study, we use data from the 2017 and 2019 YRBS and the 2017- 2020 BRFSS to find that:
Over 1.6 million adults (ages 18 and older) and youth (ages 13 to 17) identify as transgender in the United States, or 0.6% of those ages 13 and older.
Among U.S. adults, 0.5% (about 1.3 million adults) identify as transgender. Among youth ages 13 to 17 in the U.S., 1.4% (about 300,000 youth) identify as transgender.
Of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming.
Research shows transgender individuals are younger on average than the U.S. population. We find that youth ages 13 to 17 are significantly more likely to identify as transgender (1.4%) than adults ages 65 or older (0.3%).
The racial/ethnic distribution of youth and adults who identify as transgender appears generally similar to the U.S. population, though our estimates mirror prior research that found transgender youth and adults are more likely to report being Latinx and less likely to report being White compared to the U.S. population.
Our estimates of the percent of residents in U.S. regions who identify as transgender range from 1.8% in the Northeast to 1.2% in the Midwest for youth ages 13 to 17, and range from 0.6% in the Northeast to 0.4% in the Midwest for adults.
At the state level, our estimates range from 3.0% of youth ages 13 to 17 identifying as transgender in New York to 0.6% in Wyoming. Our estimates for the percentage of adults who identify as transgender range from 0.9% in North Carolina to 0.2% in Missouri.
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/
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SORRY DIANE! 😳
I should have known better than to post while I have covid. I am fully vaxxed & boosted, & the paxlovid has done a good job on minimizing flu-ish symptoms, but I definitely have noticed cognitive stuff like difficulty concentrating. I must have remembered some stat like a 17% rise or something.
Thanks for posting the facts. Further research indicates a ’22 study published Aug ’22 debunking 2018 claims of a “social contagion” theory. [Even if one heard 5% from Pew, it adds 3% non-binary to 2% trans.]
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Understood.
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