The guiro is a satisfying instrument to play. Its zippy, crunchy, blocky, clocky time-keeping beat scratches the insides of my soul. When I stepped into the ArteBorikua kiosk at the Puerto Rican Day Parade in Orlando, the handmade guiros captured me immediately. I bought one and brought it back to the FACTory to train my next gen Femmebots. As you can see, they thought Irish River Dancing is the same as salsa and merengue. 😂
Welcome back to the FACTory! I’m Dr. Nutmeg, and tonight I’m trying to decide if I should upload a few clips from the 2025 Orlando Puerto Rican Day Parade to my newest fleet of Femmebots. I tried to use basic text prompts like, “Female robots dance salsa and merengue,” but as you can see, the datasets in The FACTory have yet to machine-learn the cultural codes of the Caribbean — not a surprise since the Brobots of Silicon Valley are training their models on mainstream Americana.
If I feed the clips from the parade into their Language Learning Models (LLMs), am I a “traitor” to my culture? I am still not clear on the ethics of uploading content to these apps. They’re already stealing from New York Times, Washington Post, Hollywood, and independent artists. Plus, I was already feeling guilty about the amount of server energy I’ve been hogging since 2012 when Hazel Henderson from EthicalMarkets.com first taught me that data centers were already contributing significantly to global warming. But I didn’t let the guilt stop me because c’mon it’s too much fun writing text prompts and waiting like a little kid to see a bunch of pink robots river dance to a reggaeton beat.
Alas, the fun may be over. Bo Young Lee, President of Research & Advisory at AnitaB.org and AI Ethicist, reminded me on LinkedIn today that this new tech isn’t all fun and games, especially those of us working in marginalized spaces. She also wrote this last December: “What the Heck Does it Mean to Be Conscious of AI?:”
“Conscious AI is about looking beyond what the AI is intended to do and instead considering all the factors used to create the AI model and the externalities created by the AI model. This means scrutinizing EVERY aspect:
What data was used to train this model?
Where did that data come from, and was it stolen or collected ethically?
Who cleaned and labeled the data, and were they treated fairly?
What’s the environmental impact of the data centers powering AI systems?
Who benefits from these tools, and who’s harmed by their biases?”
A villainous mad scientist like me rarely thinks of ethics, but I’ve got a literal trademark on my name. If I don’t want anyone to steal from me, I should prolly stop stealing from others. What do you think?
Before you go…
Read/See The Femmebots coverage of the Puerto Rican Day Parade in Orlando last year.
Watch (below) Dr. Nutmeg’s attempts to mash up her Femmebots with the salsa, merengue, and reggaeton algorithms trickling down into her FACTory from the streets of Downtown Orlando!
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