Tuesday, December 8th, 2020

Time	Event
5:20a	Google workers reject company's account of AI researcher's exit as anger grows Es geht weiter: In a letter posted on Monday on Medium, Gebru’s colleagues disputed an executive’s claim that she had resigned and called internal research policies into question. “Dr Gebru did not resign, despite what Jeff Dean (Senior Vice President and head of Google Research), has publicly stated,” the letter reads before going into detail about the events that led to Gebru’s dismissal. ... In a statement issued on Friday, Dean reiterated the company’s position that Gebru had resigned and detailed the company’s research and review process, which he said required two weeks. Gebru’s paper, he said, was submitted a day before its deadline. On Monday, Gebru’s team rejected his argument, arguing that close to half of all papers are submitted within a day or less notice. “So it is clear that this is a standard which was applied unevenly and discriminatorily,” they wrote in the letter. The paper also received approval from Gebru’s manager, Samy Bengio, who said he was “stunned” by her dismissal in a public post on Facebook. Margaret Mitchell, Gebru’s co-lead on the Google Ethical AI Team, also publicly came to her defense, posting rebuttals to each of Dean’s claims on why the paper was not up to internal standards and challenging the policy itself for leading to scientific censorship. “I believe that I am obligated to speak up when my employer publicly belittles me and/or my colleagues’ scholarship,” she wrote. Current Mood: sleepy (12 Comments | Comment on this)
9:42p	Cyberpunk 2077 is dad rock, not new wave Before you hit the streets of Night City, you’ll construct your version of the game’s central character, V, in a process indicative of one of Cyberpunk 2077’s most glaring problems. For whatever reason, among all the hairstyles and eyes and makeup and tattoos you might expect, genitals are included as part of the character creation process, with two penis options — and three size settings for each! — and one vagina. (You can also opt not to select genitals at all, always viewing your V in panties or boxers at a bare minimum.) Thankfully, your character’s gender is not tied to your choice of genitals. You can create a dude with a vagina or a lady with a penis, that’s no problem. But because of everything else about how the game handles trans identity, this hardly feels like the progressive step it should be. Rather than just letting you pick your pronouns independently of all your other character creation choices, your pronouns are assigned based on your selection of voice: Pick the “feminine” voice and your pronouns are she/her, and vice versa. (There are no nonbinary pronoun options.) As a trans woman with a voice that many would not describe as “feminine,” this direct linking of gender identity to having a voice that sounds “masculine” or “feminine” feels weirdly essentializing. I could have forgiven it if the rest of the game took strides to humanize trans identities, but boy, it sure doesn’t. Ubiquitous throughout Night City are ads for a beverage called Chromanticure that feature a female-coded model with a penis visible through her skintight clothing, making it clear that in Cyberpunk 2077, trans bodies are objectified and commodified. Some cis bodies are, too, of course, but the crucial difference is that, as V, we constantly meet, interact with, and form relationships with cis characters who have far more dimension than the surface of any sexualized image on a billboard. The same can’t be said of trans characters. Even if you opt to play as a trans V, she’s not particularly well-defined. The game is about what you see through her eyes and what she goes through, not about who she is as a person. In my 40-plus hours in Night City, I never met a single character of any significance whom the game made clear was trans, and one of the only queer-coded characters I encountered was an extremely unsavory cybernetic surgeon who does extremely unsavory things. I did spot a trans flag on one character’s vehicle, though that hardly counts as positive trans representation and doesn’t even necessarily mean the character is trans. It felt more like a way for Cyberpunk 2077’s creators to say they had included positive trans representation without actually putting thought into it or making trans people a visible part of the makeup of Night City. Current Mood: amused (10 Comments | Comment on this)

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