Some colleges in this country have decided to coddle students to the point where they no longer will hand out failing grades. Also, Google was recently forced to halt the rollout of their AI image generator, Gemini, after claims of the software’s bias against white people. Mike Papantonio is joined by Independent newspaper publisher Rick Outzen to discuss.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Some colleges in this country have decided to coddle students to the point where they no longer will hand out failing grades. True story. We’re becoming a nation that’s so spoiled and privileged that we can no longer accept our own shortcomings. Here’s your trophy, Johnny. And Johnny says, what’s the trophy for? Well, you showed up. You didn’t win.
Rick Outzen: You paid your tuition.
Mike Papantonio: You didn’t win a thing. Didn’t win a game, you know, never scored anything. But here’s your trophy. Isn’t that the thinking here? Isn’t that what’s going on?
Rick Outzen: It is, and it’s snowflake world. This is where we’re paying a lot for this and if I can’t pass the class, then the teacher may lose their job. They have to give ’em extra credit to get caught up because they wouldn’t do the basic assignment. I mean, Mike, there was a time when, I know at Florida, even at Ole Miss, where I went, is that you had, you knew there were gonna be tough teachers. And to get through that class, you worked your tail off, but you accomplished something. Now, in this world, everybody’s gonna get through that class.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. So, Oregon, I’m not making this, I could not make this up. Oregon University says, little Johnny, we’re never gonna give out D’s or F’s. So just show up and you’re gonna make a C. Here’s your trophy, little Johnny. That’s what the hell’s happening. It’s just like when MIT, you had MIT and what was it, Purdue? Dartmouth. Okay. MIT and Dartmouth had a policy that they put in place about a year and a half ago. You don’t have to take an SAT or an ACT to get in. Well, they just changed that because they thought it was an absolute disaster. The kids that they were letting in without the SAT or the ACT, hell, they couldn’t write a sentence. And they couldn’t make it through the class. And so all of a sudden they decided, well, maybe we ought to go back and find out whether this person can read or write a sentence before we let ’em into Dartmouth. You understand what I’m saying?
Rick Outzen: Well, it impacts on the workforce, who you hire. You want, y’all want the best attorneys you can get outta college. You want ’em. If they’re able to, you know, if everyone gets passed, now the next thing they’ll do is they’ll lower the standards on the law exam.
Mike Papantonio: What if you’re a nurse? Okay. Don’t you want a nurse who actually knows, that might have gotten an F, but went back and did it again and got an A. Or what if you’re an engineer? I mean, if you want your engineer to be able to calculate, is this building going to fall on us? Or you certainly want your doctor to pass an anatomy test, don’t you?
Rick Outzen: Right.
Mike Papantonio: And you’re saying, oh, well look, doc, we never gave you your D or F and when you came out here to practice, you didn’t realize really where the kidneys were.
Rick Outzen: Well, you just think about, you have all the things you have to pass to make it to med school. If you pass everything, you’re just, the quality of worker. We keep saying we want better workers, we need more educated workers. We need thinkers.
Mike Papantonio: Hell, we’re having to bring ’em in. We’re bringing them in from Asia. We’re bringing them in from Europe just to fill some of the slots where they still give out D’s and F’s in Asia and Europe. And this is such a bad policy, and I’m hoping it’ll die on the vine. It seems to already be doing that with at least Dartmouth and MIT said, boy, did we screw up. What a big mistake. At Oregon University, though, you might, if you have problems passing class, enroll at Oregon University, and they’re gonna provide failure. They’re gonna teach you how to fail without ever really having any suffering because of it. That’s kind of the story. That’s the headline. Oregon University, sign up if you got problems making classes.
Mike Papantonio: Gemini, the Gemini controversy with Google, this is a story.
Rick Outzen: This is the one I wanted to talk about.
Mike Papantonio: Well, I know you do.
Rick Outzen: Because this one is amazing.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, again, you’re in the independent news business. You’ve got the best progressive newspaper, clearly in the state. Tell me your take on this with the Gemini controversy where it’s like Google has lost their frigging mind.
Rick Outzen: Well, they had to pump the brakes on Gemini. It’s an AI image generator. It came up with black founding fathers, a female Pope, Asian German Nazis. People asked for straight couples and they got pictures of gay couples. It is where, the whole problem is that they, the way they said was, well, we missed the mark.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, you think?
Rick Outzen: And that we overcompensated to show diversity.
Mike Papantonio: They were representing female popes. They were representing African-American who were Nazi SS soldiers. You think they might’ve gotten it wrong?
Rick Outzen: Well, and no guard rails.
Mike Papantonio: No guardrails at all.
Rick Outzen: The difference is, I think, in reading, trying to read what Google posted on their website, and look at it, is they were so worried about gender diversity. So if someone put in CEO that it wouldn’t be all male CEOs or whatever. But when you do that, when you start your Google search is about not what the world is, but what the world you want it to be.
Mike Papantonio: What you want it to be.
Rick Outzen: Your dream world.
Mike Papantonio: So what they did, Rick, they hit the DEI button, right, load DEI, they let the algorithms take it from there. The algorithms went crazy. And all of a sudden you have this garbage, I mean, absolute garbage. Now they say, oh, we can fix it. You can’t fix this quickly. You agree with that?
Rick Outzen: Well, it’s the same people who made it are gonna fix it. And they rushed it. We know that. They rushed this. And it is all about the algorithm, Mike. We know that. We know that just in ordinary searches, the people that get moved up in the search are the ones that have figured out how to rig the system or have paid to be hire in the system.
Mike Papantonio: Isn’t this an opportunity for Microsoft and Bing and Yahoo to at once, you have to do something about the reach of Google. Google has become so strong that nobody thinks, I don’t think to go to Bing. And I will now, I mean Microsoft or any of that, those are great search sites. They really are good search sites. But Google has moved into this area to such that we allow them to do this kind of insanity. Absolute insanity. Where if a child does a search, tell me about Nazi soldiers and an African-American soldier comes up with an SS insignia on the side of his helmet, or tell us about who the popes have been and some female fabricated Pope shows up. It’s all, it’s insanity in the way that we we’re trying to project ideas and concepts, isn’t it?
Rick Outzen: It is. Because we used to see in the early days of the computer, we would get on a search engine and try to find really interesting websites because everything was new to us. We didn’t, you would put in, if you were going somewhere, you’d put that location in and they would tell you, and would find fascinating websites that were different and it was fun and you trusted it.
Mike Papantonio: How can you trust?
Rick Outzen: You can’t trust it now.
Mike Papantonio: How can you trust Google now?
Rick Outzen: You can’t.
Mike Papantonio: After this story. It’s not just the AI, it’s not just the Gemini issue. It’s the site in general. How do we know what they’re pushing or what they’re throttling back? We know when we do stories, and I know you’ve seen the same thing, when we do a story that doesn’t gel with their political concept, they throttle it back. There’s no question about it. They will throttle it back. And so how do we trust them at all, as it is, much less when we know now that their AI has gone frigging crazy and making, just making stuff up. Just absolutely making stuff up outta thin air.
Rick Outzen: Well, if that was your main source for getting information, you can’t do it. But we’re at this point, AI is generating a lot of things out there for news networks and for news websites that are totally click bait and trying to, you have to go back to the source. But if Google is your source, you’re already screwed.
Mike Papantonio: Well, they count on people are stupid. I mean, that’s what Google counts on.
Rick Outzen: Or lazy.
Mike Papantonio: No. Lazy and stupid.
Rick Outzen: Okay.
Mike Papantonio: And yeah, there may be a generation where when you see an African-American soldier with an SS helmet on that, God, I didn’t know that that happened. And all of a sudden that’s what they’re believing. But they don’t seem overly upset about this, Rick. If you look at their responses, well, we didn’t do it exactly right. You think? We didn’t do it exactly right. And then when you really test them on what they throttle back and what they push ahead, where it comes to politics, they, what five days of hearings in Congress where it was very clear how they were throttling politics, you know.
Rick Outzen: Well, they come back and the CEO says, well, we’re not perfect. We’re emerging technology. But before you unleash it,
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Google’s become a shallow bureaucratic train wreck, they really have.
Rick Outzen: Well, they’ve all become very fat.
Mike Papantonio: And the leadership there, there’s gotta be a wake up call and say, look, people want information. They don’t wanna be socialized a certain way. They don’t want you making up crap and telling that this is truth in the world. Right?
Rick Outzen: Right.
Mike Papantonio: Rick, thanks for joining me. Okay.
Rick Outzen: Oh, it was fun. We’ll have a discussion later.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for this week. But all these segments are gonna be posted right here on this channel in the coming week. Make sure you subscribe. I’m Mike Papantonio, and this has been America’s Lawyer where we tell you stories every week that corporate media won’t tell you because their advertisers simply won’t let ’em. They don’t want to make the advertiser mad, so they don’t tell the story on a pharmaceutical, on the weapons industry, on Wall Street, whatever it may be. Or their political contact is so Democrat or it’s so Republican that they can’t tell anything in the middle. They can’t even tell you the story in the middle. We don’t have that problem around here, as you’ve seen from this show. So we hope to see you next time.
